CW Academy advisors volunteer their time to help their students learn Morse code or to improve their CW proficiency. For me, the best reward is watching a student getting excited about their success and wanting to do more. This is a very heady feeling and is difficult to express. When our students are happy, I think many of us advisors are just as happy if not more.
CWops provides awards to advisors as a token of their appreciation for what they do. These are based on the number of classes that the advisor has led.
For advising six classes:
Six class advisor award.
For advising 12 classes:
For advising 24 classes:
For 36 classes advised, an engraved iPad is awarded.
For 48 classes advised, the advisor has a choice of either a Begali “Pearl” paddle or a N3ZN model ZN-9RZ paddle.
Over the last few years, the CW Academy has had two different ways of tracking students, advisors and classes. I recently went through an exercise to consolidate some of this information into a relational database in order to help answer several questions I get along the lines of “how many students…”
There are some inaccuracies to this data mainly going back a few years where determining the exact status of a student could not be quickly done, especially using scripting tools. Hopefully, the data is accurate to within several percentage points.
The data below starts with the year 2015. You will see years in the horizontal axis for the semesters along with a two-digit number. These codes mean: 01 = January-February; 04 = April-May and 09 = September-October. Even though the CW Academy was running prior to 2015, the statistics are not available.
The data include students who were placed into a class. Some withdrew during the class; students who withdrew before classes were selected were not included. There are some other students who were not placed in a class, usually because of a lack of advisors, and these students were also not counted.
From January, 2015, through May, 2020, 6,926 students were placed in a class. Over that time span, 158 different advisors have led at least one class.
The following chart shows the number of students enrolled in each semester.
This shows a significant spike in the number of students in September, 2019. Since then, the numbers have gone down for unknown reasons.
Since 2015, 3,439 students have completed a class; many students completed more than one class (Beginner and Intermediate, for example) and are counted for each class they completed. 1,747 students completed a Beginner class, 162 students completed a Basic class (a fairly new class), 852 students completed an Intermediate class and 372 students completed an Advanced class.
The statistics in the last paragraph is summarized in the following chart.
For advisors, the following chart summarizes the number of advisor-classes per level per semester. Several advisors lead more than one class in a semester so they are counted more than once.
For the September-October, 2020, semester, we have 608 students signed up to take a class and 54 advisors signed up to lead at least one class. Every time zone in the world, except four, have at least one student signed up. There are 242 students signed up for a Beginner class, 158 Basic students, 135 Intermediate students and 73 Advanced students. As usual, North America is where most of the students are with 461 signups. There are 54 signups in Europe and the rest scattered around other parts of the world including over 25 signups in Asia.
