Online SAN Training?
I was looking at some online SAN training just yesterday, which was from a major vendor in the market, and I gotta tell you – I was not impressed. I won’t mention the vendor by name, but if I was with this particular company, I would not be happy with the quality of the product that was being produced and released to the public.
Now let me give you the conditions of this training material that I looked at. First, it was a no-cost web-based presentation. I was not about to pay for something without knowing the quality of the content, so I wanted to try out some of their freely available material first. I would assume that any training organization would want to offer their best material at all times, but perhaps this particular company does not share that idea when it comes to their no-cost material.
The actual “content” was very technical, which all SAN training stuff seems to be, so the hardest part is usually getting the audience “involved” in the subject matter. The course is a 3 hour “narrated” system (voice over) of what looked like a few PowerPoint slide sets.
The Good Points:
- The presentation did work in my browser (Firefox). Some systems I have seen require you to load a proprietary piece of software just to look at the course, but this one played just fine without any of that.
- Navigation controls available. This system has arrows and buttons that you can click that allow you to jump around through the material, both forward and back, so that you could skip ahead or review something without having to play the whole presentation again.
- There was animation in some of the slides. Animation is good as it helps to illustrate certain concepts, such as signal flow or action-reaction concepts, much better than straight text.
- Review questions were present. These are good so that the student will know if they got the key concepts that were presented.
The Bad Points:
The biggest issue I have with this particular course overall is that it was BORING! I know teaching technical topics is a challenge (from my own experience), but watching and listening to this was really painful. Here’s why.
- Poor “acting” (voice over). I am very picky about how I present my classes, and I could tell that whoever did the voice over for this material was either just reading a script, or was “just doing a job” to get this material out. There was almost no “enthusiasm” at all. I could also tell that this person had limited (if any) knowledge of the actual subject matter. In one segment, the person actually was pronouncing the words wrong! The particular subject being presented is an area where you really need to be an expert, or at least someone that has worked with the systems that are being covered.
- Poor sound quality (production issue). One of the first things I learned when trying to make video, or web-based courses, is that the difference between a good or bad video is the sound. Think of a TV show or movie where the sound was either not clear, or the levels jumped around from high to low and back again. And what about those commercials that seem to blast out at you between scenes when watching TV?
I am very picky about the quality of training I provide. Even in a web or video-based environment, you have to make this material as good as you can to keep the student interested, or at least awake, through the process. I would hope that someone would review the overall product before it was released.
Even if this material is free, it needs to represent the organization at its best. After-all, this “give-away” course should be looked at as a sales tool, and if I was the customer, I don’t think I would be buying any more training based on this offering.