On Thu, 7 May 1998, Barry Lee Brisco wrote:
> Has anyone ever tried any of the online courses offered at
> http://www.zdu.com/ ? The cost is $4.95/month and you can take as many
> courses as you wish. Just curious if anyone has experience with this
> approach. For this price, I'm wondering how much value there is.
Sorry for the late response Barry . . . still have about 800 messages
back to April, and taking them a chucnk at a time.
Yes, I've been doing ZDU courses since about december. have done the
Virtual Community one, Mary Morri's CGI course, DHTML, PERL, javscript,
Server building, etc.
Value of each course varies. Mary Morris is a great instructor, but her
content areas are refershers for me so i tend to lurk, and do only those
exercises that referesh. Katerine Prouty's Virtual Community course is
great. On that one (which I'm taking a second time) I tend to get neck
deep in it. Some others, like Javascript, were refreshers, but the
course materials, outlines and other summaries were great--worth the
$4.95 just to have the well-done cheat sheets.
Hence, it really depends on what you're after. Not every course is a
major learning opportunity yet, but they are starting to get into deeper
topics (SQL theory and whatnot) as interest grows. If you approach it
knowing that you'll likely find one great, participatory course every two
months, one or two more you'll likely lurk in for good photoshop tips or
javascript cheat sheets, and another that's good for lurking and just
watching people's examples and ideas, then it'd be beneficial.
if you approach it wanting courses on the topics you want all the time,
with everything active learning, you'll be disappointed. The community
is still developing, and course offerings in some areas are still spaced
by several months. As interest grows that will change, but for now it's
still the case.
As far as ease-of-use, I think ZDU is great. Their classroom system is
very functional and user-friendly. "most" of the new students tend to be
professionals with a reasonable degree of humbleness, so there's not a
lot of flaming and noise. The post-class lounges are good too--I find
them a lot like mini-WCA forums based on single topics. I don't go to
most of them, but for classes where the subject really interested me, it
is a nice longer-term perk to have that small community of like-minded
people there to visit once a week and bounce ideas off of.
Brett
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