Costas Senekkis wrote:
> LPIC 1 materials need to be written again from scratch (my opinion)
Great. Go right ahead ;^)
> and
> from my experience what students like more are the exercises meaning to
> have practical exercises to practice in order to learn how to do things.
What would those exercises look like in your opinion? Our manuals contain
exercises but they are usually geared towards getting readers to apply the
material in a different context, and less towards rote repetition of what is
in the text.
Back when I was a certified Novell instructor, we used to teach classes for
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server based on Novell's materials, which contained
“exercises” along the lines of:
EXERCISE. Practice listing directory content.
1. Navigate to the /tmp directory by issuing the command
cd /tmp
followed by the RETURN key.
2. Display the content of the /tmp directory by issuing the command
ls
followed by the RETURN key.
As far as I'm concerned such “exercises” are a waste of space. Anyone who
reads about the “ls” command in the training manual and doesn't try it for
themselves without being prodded to do it by the manual in the shape of an
“exercise” has a problem right there.
I'm all in favour of larger-scale “practical lab” exercises that require
people to apply their knowledge in a wider context. I'm not convinced that
setting exercises and letting people learn stuff on their own based on what
the exercise requires is a panacea – it may work in a self-learning setup
where students have essentially unlimited time, but I used to teach commercial
instructor-led classroom courses where there was never enough time to begin
with, and therefore letting students work out stuff on their own would have
(a) severely limited the scope of the course, and (b) probably led to riots on
the part of participants who presumably paid loads of money to have an
instructor teach them stuff, rather than have an instructor sit in the room
while they were teaching themselves stuff which they could just as well have
done at home for free.
Every so often we would be able to teach a longer class where (on top of the
usual smaller-scale exercises interspersed with class work) on the last day we
would have the opportunity to ask students to, e.g, “please build a system
that has a web server in the DMZ for a number of internal users who can use
FTP to put stuff into their accounts (but not into other users' accounts),
with a suitable firewall, log monitoring, etc.” in order to bring together
everything we taught during the course in one big example, but unfortunately
these were the exception rather than the rule. There are people who think that
you should *start* your course with that exercise and have the rest of the
course consist of the participants figuring out the various bits and pieces
needed to put this together, but we never got that to work really well. The
theory says that it's easier if you have, say, nine people in the class and
you can divide them up in groups of three, with one web server guy, one FTP
server guy, and one firewall guy per group, where all the web server guys get
together etc. and then go back to their group to explain the web server to the
other two, but our classes, especially the more advanced classes, seldom if
ever were that big.
Anselm
--
Anselm Lingnau · [email protected] · https://www.tuxcademy.org
Freie Schulungsmaterialien für Linux und Open-Source-Software
Free Training Materials for Linux and Open-Source Software
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