As a licensed and accredited online university, Nexford has a huge amount of automation across the organization and provides students with support from faculty and career advisors. After offering degrees, Nexford puts on its placement hats by fixing its graduates with partner employers.
We’re licensed by the Higher Education Licensure Commission (HELC) in Washington DC, which is the same organization that licenses all physical universities operating in Washington DC and accredited by Accreditation Service for International Colleges (ASIC), which is an independent body providing accreditation services.
Nexford University launches scholarship for future leaders
The Global Leaders Scholarship marks Nexford’s first anniversary. In the 12 months since its inception, over 1,000 people have begun a course at the online university.
As part of its mission to make a first-class education available for all, regardless of location, background, or gender, Nexford wants to spread the message to would-be leaders that talent doesn’t recognize social status or geography.
“Many people want to lead but few do”, says Dr. Sheila Fournier-Bonilla, Chief Academic Officer at Nexford. “Leadership starts with having the right mindset. Don’t wait for permission. Act now, and start creating the story that you want people to tell about you.”
Nexford
became based due to a persistent gap among the needs of these days’s groups and the abilties that young people are leaving university with. The proof bears this out: greater than 90 percent of students pursue higher schooling to construct a career, however most effective eleven percentage of commercial enterprise leaders think nowadays’s graduates are ready to enter the body of workers, in line with a survey with the aid of Gallup.
All Nexford packages were designed to offer students the realistic talents with a view to reach enterprise from day one among their jobs. rather than reading books and research papers, students analyze from fabric that changed into ‘born virtual’: created for interactive, online getting to know.
Wexford’s founders had been so determined to create packages that served the needs of these days’s organizations that they asked leaders at a number of the sector’s largest corporations what they needed in their new recruits. additionally they enlisted the assist of big facts to investigate over 30 million process openings.
Dr Fournier-Bonilla
Dr Fournier-Bonilla says she can’t wait to welcome the new cohort of Global Leaders Scholarship recipients to the university. “Everyone should have access to high-quality education,” she says. “This is our mantra. It’s the underlying principle behind our curriculum: make it relevant, valuable, meaningful. I want to help every learner to make a difference in the world and be the best version of themselves.”
Nexford is 100% online and sees learners master relevant global leadership skills. In addition to practicing core business skills, learners can choose from elective courses or major in hot topic areas, including Sustainability, Managing Hyperconnectivity, and Doing Business Across the World.
Learners become part of Nexford’s global community, comprising a cohort from 40-plus countries, building skills through the innovative use of technology and receive dedicated support from faculty and success advisors.
Dr. Fournier-Bonilla is encouraging anyone – in any corner of the world – who has their sights set on success to apply for the Global Leaders Scholarship.
Nexford University lands $10.8M pre-Series A to scale its flexible remote learning platform
Two profound problems face the higher education sector globally — affordability and relevance. Whether you live in Africa, Europe, or the U.S., a major reason why people don’t go to university or college or even drop out is that they cannot afford tuition fees. On the other hand, relevance shows the huge gap between what traditional universities teach and what global employers actually look for. It’s not a secret that universities focus a bit too much on theory.
Over the past few years, there has been the emergence of a number of alternative credential providers trying to provide students with the necessary skills to earn and make a living. Nexford University is one such platform, and today, it has closed a $10.8 million pre-Series A funding round.
Dubai-based VC Global Ventures led the new round. Other investors include Future Africa’s new thematic fund (focused on education), angel investors, and family offices. Unnamed VCs from 10 countries, including the U.S., U.K., France, Dubai, Switzerland, Qatar, Nigeria, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, also took part. To date, Nexford has raised $15.3 million, following the first tranche of $4.5 million in seed funding raised two years ago.
Fadl Al Tarzi launched Nexford University in 2019
Fadl Al Tarzi launched Nexford University in 2019. The tech-enabled university is filling affordability and relevance gaps by providing access to quality and affordable education.
“That way, you get the best of both worlds,” CEO Al Tarzi said to TechCrunch. “You get practical skills that you can put to work immediately or for your future career while actively keeping a job. So the whole experience is designed as a learning as a service model.”
Nexford Unversity lets students study at their own pace. Once they apply and get admitted into either a degree program or a course program, they choose how fast or slow they want the program to be.
What’s it like understanding with Nexford University?
Nexford University doesn’t offer standardized and theoretical tests or assignments as most traditional universities do. Al Tarzi says the company employs what he calls a competency-based education model where students prove mastery by working on practical projects.
For instance, a student working on an accounting course will most likely need to create a P&L statement, analyze balance sheets and identify where the error is to correct it. The platform then gives the student different scenarios showing companies with different revenues and expense levels. The task? To analyze and extract certain ratios to help make sense of which company is profitable and the other unit economics involved.
Though Nexford plays in the edtech space, Al Tarzi doesn’t think the company is an edtech company. As a licensed and accredited online university, Nexford has a huge amount of automation across the organization and provides students with support from faculty and career advisors.
After delivering degrees, Nexford puts on its ordering hats by correcting its graduates with member employers.
There’s a massive scarcity of jobs in Nigeria, and notwithstanding the excessive unemployment, it’s surely difficult to find extraordinarily certified access-level graduates. So Nexford has finished several partnerships wherein employers sponsor their personnel or quickly-to-be employees for upskilling and rescaling functions.
An illustration is with Sterling bank, a neighborhood bank inside the US maximum Nigerian banks have yearly workouts in which they rent graduates and put them on weeks-lengthy education programs. Sterling financial institution employs any candidate it feels did extremely good after the capital extensive (8 weeks in maximum cases) packages.
So what Nexford has done
So what Nexford has done is to partner with Sterling to fund the tuition for high school leavers. When these students go through Nexford’s programs for the first year, they begin to get part-time placements at Sterling. Upon graduation, they get a job in the bank.
“That saves Sterling the training cost and our tuition fee is almost equal to the training that they provided for students. Also, students start paying back once they get place, so it’s a win-win.”
Nexford University has learners from 70 countries, with Nigeria its biggest market yet. Nexford also has blue-chip partnerships with Microsoft, LinkedIn Learning. And IBM to provide access to tools, courses, and programs to improve the learning experience.
One of the major gains of this learning experience is how it prepares people for remote jobs. Nexford is bullish on its virtual skills grid, where people will get jobs remotely regardless of their location on the platform.
Sub-Saharan Africa
“Across Sub-Saharan Africa by the year 2026, there’s gonna be a shortage of about 100 million university seats as a result of huge growth in youth population not met by growth and supply. Even if you want to build universities fast, you wouldn’t be able to meet the demand. And that spirals down to the job market. We don’t think the local economy will produce enough jobs in Nigeria, for instance. But we want to enable people to get remote jobs across the world and not necessarily have to migrate.”
Last year, Nexford’s revenues grew by 300%. This year, the company hopes to triple the size of its enrollment from last year, the CEO said.
Nexford is big on designing students
Nexford is huge on designing college students’ curricula based totally on analysis of what their corporation wishes. Al Tarzi tells me that the organization continually follows the huge statistics technique, asking themselves, “How do we discover what employers worldwide are searching out and hold our curriculum alive and applicable?” “We expand proprietary era that permits us to investigate job vacancies as well as numerous different statistics sources; use AI to apprehend how data sets and build a curriculum primarily based on the ones findings. So, in short, we start with the result in thoughts,” he solutions.
The agency is keen on enhancing its era regardless. It wants to analyze skills greater correctly and automate more functions to beautify person experience. That’s what the investment can be used for similarly to fuelling its nearby expansion plans (in particular in Asia) and investing in boom and product improvement. in keeping with the latter, the net college says it will be launching associate packages with greater employers globally to facilitate both placement and upskilling and rescaling.
Merging both worlds of tech and the traditional university model is no easy feat
Merging both world of tech and the traditional university version isn’t any easy feat. The former is set efficiency, person-centricity, and product, amongst others. The latter embodies tension and continues to lag behind rapid-paced innovation. even as there’s been a increase in edtech. most startups attempt to sidestep the enterprise’s forms via launching an app or a MOOC. Nexford’s model of strolling a diploma-granting, certified, authorized. And the regulated university is greater tough but in it lies a lot possibility.
Iyin Aboyeji, destiny Africa wellknown associate CEO, is familiar with this. It’s one purpose why the company is the primary investment out of future Africa’s soon-to-be-launched fund targeted at the destiny of gaining knowledge of and why he believes the organisation is a game-changer for better schooling in Africa. “during the pandemic, even as many universities in Nigeria were shut down due to labour disputes, Nexford was already turning in an modern and low cost new version of on-line better education designed for a capabilities-based economy.”
For fashionable companion at global Ventures Noor Sweid, Nexford university is redressing the mismatch among the deliver of expertise and the demands of these days’s virtual financial system. “we’re thrill to associate with Fadl and the Nexford team on their adventure closer to expanding get right of entry to to generic great better training in rising markets,” she stated.
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