2022 was a busy year for the APNIC Academy, with 141 instructor-led (live online, hybrid, and face-to-face) workshops and tutorials delivered to 3,849 people across the Asia Pacific region.
Internet Routing, IPv6 and RPKI were the most frequently taught subjects, accounting for more than half of the training delivered over the year.
Self-paced training via the online APNIC Academy platform attracted 8,385 new account holders in 2022, with course completions reaching 2,010 and the number of virtual lab launches increasing to 11,906. The total number of hours spent on virtual labs exceeded 12,125 hours. The introduction of Open Lab training in October — an initiative to support and encourage participants to get more hands-on experience — has proved very popular and significantly increased APNIC Academy lab usage last year.
Eighteen live webinars were delivered and reached 1,048 participants. Webinars were delivered by a mix of guest and APNIC speakers and topics included DWDM, Root Server Deployment and Operation, mod_security and SD-WAN and more.
Community support
Partnering with the community is a core part of the APNIC Academy’s training efforts. Training was provided at 11 NOG events, in addition to the APNIC, APRICOT, and APAN conferences. The APNIC Academy also partnered with NRENs, NIRs, CERTs, and government agencies to deliver training in 12 Asia Pacific economies.
The APNIC Academy grew its network of Community Trainers (CT) this year and launched the Retained Community Trainer (RCT) program to help meet the increasing demand for training. We welcomed five RCTs to the training team, who dedicated time each month to lead training on topics such as RPKI and IPv6 in their economies. The RCTs led 28 training events including eight virtual Open Labs.
APNIC Academy’s pool of Voluntary Community Trainers (VCTs) also continued growing, with three new VCTs added to the team. APNIC VCTs hail from 15 economies and assisted in 80 training events in 2022.
If you’re interested in supporting technical training in your economy as a VCT, APNIC would love to hear from you. If you’re able to provide a larger time commitment to training, there’s also an opportunity to become a RCT and contribute even more to the community — you can find out more and apply online.
Curriculum development
Training content and curriculum development was another focus for 2022, resulting in the addition of one new self-paced online course and a large number of new labs to the APNIC course catalogue, including:
- A new self-paced OSPF course, including 56 topics and ten hours of new learning material.
- 11 new virtual labs to the APNIC Academy including DHCPv6-PD, an RPKI Lab with RPKI-Prover, an RPKI Lab with FORT, the Practical Packet Analysis Lab, IPv6 Security Lab, MPLS and Segment Routing: MPLS LDP and SR Lab, NMM SNMP Libre NMS & RRD Lab, Log Management and Flow Monitoring Lab, BGP Link State BGP-LS Lab, Security Monitoring and Analysis Lab, IPv4/IPv6 Dual-Stack Lab and SRv6 Lab.
- Finalizing six modules for the new Introduction to Cybersecurity course and developing the first four modules for the new BGP self-paced course.
- Deploying a new version of Eduroam to provide access to eligible APNIC Academy users, including Eduroam account management.
Technical Assistance
With APNIC Academy trainers resuming travelling, the delivery of an IXP workshop to assist the Maldives to establish a local IXP (MVIX) was one of the highlights of the year. APNIC Academy trainers also helped Tonga re-establish communication to the outer islands via satellite (following the volcanic eruption in late December 2021) and assisted the Papua New Guinea government to migrate their network from Huawei equipment to Cisco.
The Zoom-based Technical Assistance platform, launched in 2021 to offer Members individual support, provided Members in Myanmar, Malaysia, New Zealand, Bangladesh, India, and Hong Kong technical support on issues including RPKI, reverse DNS, routing, and IPv6.
Return to face-to-face training
The APNIC Academy continued to deliver training primarily online in the first half of 2022, and as the world became more comfortable with travelling, in the second half of 2022 we were pleased to be back to face-to-face training.
To support the increasing demand for training across the region, APNIC not only increased the training team through Community Trainers, but also welcomed new team members:
- Training Delivery Manager for South East Asia and East Asia — Sheryl (Shane) Hermoso (appointment officially confirmed in 2022).
- Training Delivery Manager for South Asia and Oceania — Terry Sweetser.
- Network Analyst / Technical Trainer — Awal Haolader.
- Learning Content Developer — Md Abdullah Al Naser.
In 2023, we look forward to welcoming another three technical trainers to help increase our training reach around the region. As the latest APNIC Survey indicated, community demand for face-to-face training is as strong as ever, and while travel is almost back to normal, live online and self-paced training will continue to be expanded and delivered in 2023 and beyond.
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Great summary. Nicely written.