Hi Chris, On Wed, 22 Feb 2006, chris wrote: > > I have recently withdrawn from the MSCA in messaging at my local college. The > instructor had to manually sit down with every student to complete 12 of the > labs, all of which did not work . In the end I dumped the official Microsoft > "official" manual and worked out what I needed to do myself. For the whole of > the semester he made the excuse that a technician would be employed to make > sure the lab was set up properly.
disclaimer: the following response is based on personal experience so it is terribly long and YMWV I'm assuming you typo'd and mean MCSA. I taught MCSE for over 4 years and I am not an MCT (Microsoft Certified Trainer). I was originally hired to replace the outgoing MCT who didn't have either the technical skills required to keep a Microsoft lab working or the social skills to address student questions. The private college had also invested a large chunk of $$$ to buy official courseware, official books, and become an official MS partner (one of the requirements was to have an MCT on board). Before dropping the MCT, the school had also learned (the expensive way) that the books were terribly written, the labs asked students to point and click to find screens (with many of the intermediate steps missing) and failed to ask any probing questions (like: why did I just bother to point and click my way to this screen?). My first task after getting the Microsoft lab to work again was to write a custom lab manual. That and do whatever it took to get the understanding into student's heads so they would pass their certifications. (An interesting side note is that by the time the school closed down, it had an entire room crammed with materials that had been purchased but weren't worth using. The contents were worth several hundred thousand dollars.) The other vendors' materials aren't much better. Cisco has been long notorious for having grammatical errors and downright mis-information in their "official" texts (the CCNA is currently over 1330 pages in 6 pounds worth of 2 books), but this is finally starting to get better. I've yet to see a decent published CCNA lab manual and have been keeping my own custom lab manual from 1999 up-to-date through exam revisions. When the college wanted to offer a security course for the then upcoming security certifications, they asked me to put together a course with a custom manual. I included the security fundamentals that made sense to me to include in a text and a labs designed for FreeBSD desktops with some Windows, Redhat and SCO systems as targets. I also created custom courseware for learning Cisco PIX for the Cisco security exams and Checkpoint for the Checkpoint exams. As all of these were new certifications, published materials either didn't exist yet or were of poor quality. Now that the exams have been around for a while, I provide an "official" text as supplementary reading material but continue to use my own labs and keep them current as exam objectives evolve. Interestingly, even though I'm a current CCSE who has taught security for nearly 10 years as well as consulted on Checkpoint, I can't teach an "official" Checkpoint course at my current college as they are not an official training center. In order to do so, they would have to pay $5000 USD, I would have to write an exam and supply a tape of my teaching in order to be a qualified instructor, and the college would have to pay top $ for training materials as only the official materials which are only available from Checkpoint are allowed--no custom courseware/labs here. I'm in no hurry to become "official" as my teaching philosophy has always been: yup, you need to understand these concepts in order to pass the exam but you're not leaving my classroom until you prove to me you know how and why to use the product. In my mind, this brings up several fundamental flaws in the current IT certification model: - exams are not designed to be practical. Unless the course teaching the material in the exam is supported by a larger context (e.g. one course in a well designed university/college diploma), it is a mistake to take a IT certification course to learn how to use the product. It shouldn't even be a consideration if you take a "boot camp" course as it is humanly impossible to learn a product in a week or consider yourself an expert after 40 hours of use... - it is so luck of the draw when you slap down your $ and put your faith in a training center and the instructor for the course. "Official" only means they spent the money in the hopes of making money. I'm sure we could literally sell a book on training horror stories experienced by the people on this list (hmmm, wonder if that could be a fundraiser???) These are issues we need to keep in mind when creating the exam infrastructure. We may not be able to solve them, but we should try our best to address them. > That experience leads me to think that it may be better to consider > "official" Instructors/ Teachers/Lecturors training/lab support guides. I personally would love to see a well written: - lab manual for students which consists of enough background theory to get started, followed by a hands-on exercise designed to enforce the concept in the theory, followed by some probing questions to make sure the student "got it", followed by references to additional information should the student wish to pursue more information on that subject - instructor manual containing more background theory to provide a larger context, suggestions for class discussion, more probing questions to ask students as they do their labs, sample quizzes and tests to help reinforce the material FWIW, the only "official" lab & instructor manuals we bought more than once (because they were actually very well written) were for the CIW Security Professional/Analyst exams. Here is an example description: http://www.ciwcertified.com/certifications/CIWv5.asp?comm=CI&llm=3#foundations > specialising and concentrating on high quality instruction materials and > online distance learning teaching guides the BSD cert organisation would be > providing a higher quality of delivery in sysadmin education than many of > the big certification players. It is my opinion that in terms of "official > study guides" if BSD cert were to concentrate on instruction > materials/resources then this it would have the double benefit of advocating > the use of BSD to a lot more system administrators than an individual > "official study guide" could and will generate revenue. If you win over the > teachers then you gain a very powerful ally in terms of advocacy. As a > teacher Dru, just think of how many sysadmins you have influenced to try BSD? It still comes down to an agreed upon framework to bring this into actuality. How do we: - collaborate without driving the editors nuts? I really think a collaboration of people with real-world experience doing different things on differing BSDs would make an awesome text but I'm not sure how to compile everything together without losing anything - pay people? Putting a book together is a lot of work and time away from the day job that feeds the family - publish the result? We've had some threads on all three of these. The framework hasn't started to gel yet though. > To me, my local college is a measure of market saturation of certification > brands. If a certification vendor has reached the local college then they are > big player. So here is a prediction, when the first Open Source certification > runs a course at my local college that vendor will in all likelihood be the > most successful "brand" in open source certification. . Let's make it BSD then ;-) Dru _______________________________________________ BSDCert mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nycbug.org/mailman/listinfo/bsdcert
