This was published 6 years ago
Apple, RMIT University partner to offer Australia-first Swift coding courses
By Tim Biggs
RMIT has become the first university in Australia to offer courses based on Apple's 'App Development with Swift' curriculum, partnering with the iPhone-maker to give thousands of students the opportunity to learn app development skills.
Apple has this week expanded its previously US-focused Everyone Can Code initiative globally, aiming to help students at all levels become proficient with its open-source Swift programming language, and RMIT will use the curriculum to offer a new online program from this month and an on-campus short course from February 2018.
Apple VP Lisa Jackson meets RMIT students at the university this week.
"Our program has been incredibly popular among US schools and colleges, and today marks an important step forward as we expand internationally," said Apple CEO Tim Cook in a statement.
"We are proud to work with RMIT and many other schools around the world who share our vision of empowering students with tools that can help them change the world."
Swift is an open-source programming language created by Apple, which can be used to make apps for iOS.
Apple's vice president of environment, policy and social initiatives, Lisa Jackson, attended an event in Melbourne for RMIT's announcement of the partnership. She told Fairfax Media that the company thinks of its App Store not only as a marketplace but as a site of economic development as the app economy grows globally.
"A vibrant and strong App Store of course brings people into our ecosystem, but it gives back just as much," she said.
"There's no Apple without an App Store, there's no App Store without great developers and there's no great developers without a great language and great institutions where they can learn it."
Apple already offers free educational books and teacher's guides for Swift on iBooks, and has released an iPad app designed for kids and beginners called Swift Playgrounds, but Ms Jackson says the company wants a "continuum" in learning, where people can meet begin Swift at any point in their life and master it.
"Coding should be accessible, it should be empowering, it should be intuitive. Like our products", she says.
Martin Bean, RMIT's vice-chancellor and president, said inclusiveness was a goal the university and Apple shared. The university will offer 100 scholarships to teachers so they can carry programming skills back to their classrooms, and will run a free summer coding school to give 30 secondary students the tool to build their first app.
"That was more important to us than just about anything else. How can we use this moment to really get it to scale," Mr Bean said of its partnership with Apple, which was only struck a few weeks before the official announcement.
"The beauty of the curriculum and the way we've structures it is we want it to go very horizontal. Programming really is a language everybody needs to understand".
He said he expects the courses will be taken up by many more students than just those going to university for IT or computer science.
"We can't just focus on the 18-year-old [student] coming in to tertiary education. The vast majority of people who need to reskill right now are already in the work force, and many of them are being displaced as we speak.," he said.
"I hope that what will end up happening is we'll have a whole lot of people who want a career change, or want to get a job, or want to reskill, that will come in and actually get these kind of competencies."
Completing all five units of RMIT's online course — which is endorsed by its industry partners including Tigerspike and Bilue — will earn students a certified credential in Swift and can also be used as credit in related associate degrees at the school. RMIT took its first enrolments for the program this week.
Students who take the short course from next year will also be able to earn credit should they choose to move into an associate degree.