I'm on slide 28 of 56 of the Networker Overview eLearning course. I had to take a break to avoid going crazy, so I thought I'd post my thoughts about this format and EMC's use of it.
When you login to the account with the credits for an eCourse which has been booked, the EMC site has a link under education for you to click on to get to the course. Weirdly, when I clicked on that it just took me back to the main page of the site again (but it seems I was logged in with a temporary system generated username, perhaps in a virtual session of some kind). Then there was no pointer or tip or explanation but I guessed to navigate to the same area again. This time it started "Saba" in my browser (I only tried FireFox) and gave me access to the course and accompanying PDF for me to download.
Ok, the content is worthwhile. They have information here that is more detailed and exhaustive than what I can find on their forums. The info is slightly more user friendly than the manuals.
But they really missed an opportunity to make this great and the envy of the IT world of training courses! Come on EMC you're big enough, you have enough money. You should be able to make these eCourses shine and rock!
What Sux:
The voice actors hired to read out the text of the materials obviously don't know or care anything about the material they are reading about. They sound like robots. It's not quite as bad as text to speech programs where you get a robot voice reading our your word with no clue to the inflection or emphasis. But there isn't much more humanity here.
It's surprisingly like a bunch of power point slides with someone reading out the text. and waiting for you to click next so they can read out the next slide, and so on. They actually say, "This module covers the topics on this slide. Please take the time to familiarise yourself with the topics on this slide". Man, that's cheating.
They should aim to make these as good as real courses with real instructors. They should add some personal anecdotes to help get the concept across, add some humour or at least humanity!
They should have someone draw some diagrams on a whiteboard and let us see what he's drawing while hearing him explain it. Again, aim for the best part of real instructor led courses and see how you can come as close as possible.
They should take some useful questions from the dozens and dozens of courses that have been held already, and interject them into the course. Questions and answers. See it as a way to review the material or explain it in a new way. This takes thought and brains, but it's what would set apart anyone who did courses like this from rubbish like what I'm enduring right now.
VMware has surpassed their mother company EMC with their VMWorld presentations which are available online. You can hear the presenter, a real human, someone with experience in the product and passion about their topic. While listening to them you can see the slides they're showing. In a way it's lower tech as I've not see any animations, but the bits I've mentioned in this paragraph far surpass the differences between a flash animation in the EMC vCourses and simple powerpoint + audio used in VMWorld presentations.
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