Symbian, the smartphone OS company, are pulling a smart move (pun intended) by offering free assistance to Universities and their lecturers to have Symbian programming skills built into courses. Very clever.

They’re designed to make it easy for universities to create courses that teach Symbian software development and to integrate a Symbian component into existing computer science courses.

Those who sign up are showered with free course materials, training, technical support, development literature, expert Symbian lecturers.

It’s all part of the idea to “maintain the growth of the thriving Symbian ecosystem,” what ever that means in English.

As a sweetener to the lecturers to get involved, Symbian will provide “exposure to Symbian’s industry partners.” Pretty healthy if you fancy running a software development company and want to get exposure for your potential products, or you’re getting a little bored of Uni life and fancy impressing those in industry that you’re a bit of visionary.

Nokia are the dominant shareholder in Symbian (47.9% share holding) and you can see how seriously they’re taking getting their software into education, they’ve even got a Head of Academic Relations, a Harri Pennanen.

If you fancy getting involved, just drop a mail to academy@symbian.com and tell them that Digital-Lifestyles sent you.

Symbian Academy

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