On Wed, Jun 19, 2002 at 03:09:09PM -0700, William R Ward wrote: > > I've talked to just about everyone I can think of who might be able to > help, and have just about run out of ideas. It's easy to get a room,
You should talk to somebody in the nationwide training business! 8-} > but to get a room with computers is hard. And I don't have the funds > to buy a half-dozen PC's, nor the roadies to schlep them to the site > and back each time. I want a room that already has PC's in it. And > there is the problem. > > Any suggestions would be welcome. I'm located in the San Francisco > Bay Area, in case you have any specific ideas; but general tips would > be welcome as well. You might want to check out www.classrooms4u.com and www.catrainingcenters.com, both of which rent out computer-filled rooms nationwide; there are lots of other outfits as well. You should expect to pay upwards of about $1k per day for your rental, although you might be able to pay on a number-of-students basis too. However, there are a few caveats you should keep in mind when shopping for this type of service: 1) the classrooms often suck (see below); 2) the contract language is usually very unsatisfactory. For example, many will disavow any responsibility for problems, so theoretically if you rent a room in Chicago for Mon-Fri, and it doesn't exist, or you can't get in, or the computers are missing, etc., that's tough luck. That won't be much consolation if you have to refund all the payments of your frustrated students, and have nobody to sue to recover your losses; 3) the cancellation clause is very important, because you'd rather not have to pay for the room if you have to cancel the course four weeks out due to insufficient enrollment. Another problem is that many of the rental classrooms turn out to be "New Horizons Learning Center" facilities, which IMHO are very badly configured. The projected computer image is only about 3.5ft on the diagonal, so the students in the 4th and 5th rows (there should be 3 rows max!) spend the entire class asking "is that a 0 or an O on line 3", and "What page number are you on?" Also, the desks are so cramped that there's little room for their binders and laptops. I like at least 36in between rows of seats, so that I can move easily down rows and look over a student's shoulder to see his screen, and these places tend to pack them in like sardines, making this "patrolling" awkward. Of course, the other problem is that 99% of these facilities will be giving you Windows boxes, although some of them might let you serve Unix/Linux to them via telnet from over your laptop, or from over the Internet. In summary, I have some experience and knowledge of computer-classroom rental companies, but I haven't found one I like enough to use on a regular basis, or recommend to anybody yet. Anybody know a good outfit? Good luck, -Tim *==============================================================================* | Tim Maher, CEO, CONSULTIX (206) 781-UNIX; (866) DOC-PERL; (866) DOC-LINUX | | [EMAIL PROTECTED] teachmeunix.com teachmeperl.com teachmelinux.net | | JULY 8-11: OO Perl Fundamentals; JULY 29-31: Database Prog. with Perl | *- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - * | NEW Seminar Series! "DAMIAN CONWAY's Adv. Perl Workshop"; Seattle 7/15-19 | | Adv. OOP * Adv. Module Techniques * Programming Perl 6 * Text Parsing | *==============================================================================*
