Bridging Industry and Academia - Crowd Learning comes to Rescue

With the world increasingly moving online during the pandemic, iBridge used its crowd learning resources to bring together bright students from underprivileged areas in South Asia, especially Sindh, Pakistan.

iBridge is a crowd learning platform that acts as a bridge between the industry and academia. It evolved from an interview preparation meet-up for local fresh and experienced engineers in Fremont CA to an online crowd learning platform that allows passionate students from underprivileged areas of Sindh to meet daily to discuss different topics and solve coding problems together.

As most of the meet ups were not allowed during the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Shahid and Srini, the organisers of iBridge Interview Preparation meet-up, decided to move these crowd learning meet-ups online. This allowed iBridge to gain even more traction as it started attracting audience from multiple continents and converted its weekly sessions to meetings that took place 7 days a week.

This also gave birth to smaller study groups within this meet-up which consisted of like-minded people, who were willing to spend more time doing problem-solving sessions with each other. This mainly included candidates, who were actively looking for a job and spending more 8-10 hours pre day on VC, solving the problems in a group.

This soon transformed into an informal experiment for the underprivileged areas of South Asia. In a short span of time, iBridge was able to attract even more students from these underprivileged areas, who were willing to take ownership of their own learning experience.

As education remains a distant dream from many living in the under-privileged areas of a country, learning experiences of most students are crippled by lack of basic infrastructure, dearth of good teachers and absence of competition between schools. As a result villages keep on lagging behind, while bigger cities' pace of education is accelerating with every passing day.

However, the advent of technology has now made it possible for individuals to choose their own company flexibly through online meet-ups on social media, facebook live and other free apps. If someone wants to learn how to code, all that he or she has to do is join a programming meet-up, where people of similar interests and from different geo-graphical locations can meet each other to learn together.