Global online education is thriving from Galway through turbulent times

As the coronavirus rages across the world, one Galway company – specialising in free online learning – has seen a five-fold increase in traffic to its already busy website…making it one of the top 5,000 most popular websites in the world.

Alison, the global free online learning platform, based in Parkmore, has over 14 million registered members worldwide and two million graduates of their 1,500-plus free online courses. This surge in website traffic is due to several factors, according to Alison founder/CEO Mike Feerick.

“With so many people now working from home, the obvious thing for many is to spend time upskilling online, doing the courses that they have perhaps put off doing for years,” he said.

Popular courses are Microsoft Excel, Touch Typing, Project Management and across the developing world, English language courses.

“We anticipated the impact of the Coronavirus early on and see it not just as an opportunity to help but as a responsibility,” said Mike.

Alison, he said had ‘created courses in the past to educate global audiences about the Swine Flu, SARS and Ebola epidemics’.

“During the Ebola epidemic in West Africa, of the 50,000 people in West Africa who studied the Alison course, many found it the only informational resource available to them, where government information efforts were scarce on the ground,” he revealed.

Mike Feerick also firmly believes that Ireland has ‘the resolve necessary across the population to deal with the crisis’ – and that is through aggressive testing and tracing.

But he added: “The lack of coordination across the US States and the lack of national leadership is a great cause for concern for us here.”

“Where I am most concerned however is Africa, where the hospital and informational resources available elsewhere are not as developed”.

To combat the lack of information on Coronavirus, Alison created a course on the disease (https://alison.com/coronavirus) and, with the help of medical professionals across the world who are members of Alison, have translated the course into over 50 languages.

“It’s a big undertaking which we are organising through our office in South Africa. Our target is any language which is spoken by over 10 million people. It has been an interesting exercise” he said.

Alison has also seen greater demand in Ireland where it already has 200,000 members.

“Students are taking time at home to do courses such as Maths. We have free video grinds on Lower and Higher Junior and Leaving Cert maths and relevant courses in the Sciences and Business.

“They have the opportunity also to explore areas that they might have an interest in away from the school curriculum, such as coding, or even make-up artistry.

With the current boom in traffic, Alison is expanding rapidly, and is seeking to fill several positions at its Parkmore, Galway Headquarters.

While Alison now has offices in South Africa, Nigeria and Mumbai, India, its “brain trust”, as Mike Feerick calls it, is based in Parkmore. Everything is decided out of Galway he said, all strategy and implementation, taking the time to add that Ireland needs more Irish-owned internationally trading businesses that brings new money into the country, and moreover, the Galway area.

Alison has immediate openings in technology in back-end and front-end engineering, systems administration, Database management, Business Analysis, Data Science and Data Analytics. It also has vacancies in global marketing.

Mike Feerick states that marketing vacancies have been hard to fill from Galway, due to the scarcity of businesses who run marketing operations from the West of Ireland.

If anyone would like to apply, email careers@alison.com

You will also find this story – and 18 pages on Galway’s response to the Coronavirus pandemic – in this week’s Connacht Tribune, on sale in shops today. You can also buy a digital edition online from www.connachttribune.ie or have a paper included with your supermarket shop delivery.