RAINMore people are asking whether they can learn artificial intelligence or robotics from an institution based in Africa while they live in London, Toronto, Houston, Sydney or Dubai. The honest answer is yes. The better question is how to judge whether a particular programme will work for you from where you are.
Start with the timetable, not the brochure
Online courses fail most often for a simple reason: the live sessions fall at times the learner cannot keep. A class that suits Lagos at ten in the morning is four in the morning in New York. So the first thing to check is whether the course runs at sensible hours in your own time zone.
At RAIN, cohorts abroad are organised by time zone. Classes run on Friday early evening, Saturday morning and Sunday evening, in your local time, and they are taught by tutors who live in that time zone. A learner in Manchester and a learner in Perth follow the same curriculum, but each meets a tutor whose working day matches their own.
Ask how you will practise
AI and robotics are learnt by doing. Watching someone else train a model or wire a motor teaches very little. Before you enrol anywhere, ask what you will build each week and on what equipment.
Practice at a distance used to be the weak point of online engineering courses. Today a great deal can be done in the browser: writing and testing microcontroller code, tuning a controller, planning a robot's path, training and testing a neural network. RAIN's RIDE Lab provides labs of this kind, and the Hyper-Realistic Virtual School gives each cohort a shared 3D classroom and lab, so learners work side by side even when they are far apart.
Be clear about the certificate
A certificate from an institution in another country is not automatically a qualification in yours. That is true whichever way you cross a border. RAIN certificates and Professional Certificates are issued by RAIN in Nigeria. They are not UK, US, Canadian, Australian or UAE qualifications, and a good provider will tell you so plainly.
What gives such a certificate its value is evidence. Employers increasingly look past the paper to the work: the projects you built, the code you wrote, the problems you solved. A programme that ends with a portfolio of working products gives you something you can show in any country.
Check the people and the work behind the institution
Look for the people who teach, what they have built and who has written about them. An institution that works on real products for real problems should be able to show you those products. RAIN publishes its projects, its research and engineering areas, and press coverage on its research page, and its trainees publish their work in a public showcase.
What to do next
If you live in the UK, the USA, Canada, Australia or the UAE, open your country's page on the RAIN website. It shows the class times for your cohort, the fees in your currency, and what the certificate is and is not, so you can decide with the facts in front of you.