How to Know You are Watching a Bad Online Course

Everyone knows time is money, but not everyone cares to respect this when it is about someone else’s time. This time I am talking about the online or computer-based training courses. I’ve been on both sides – learning and teaching IT courses over the years and here is my list of indicators to spot a bad course so not to waste your time.

Presenter (I can’t use the respectful word ‘teacher’ in this case) just reads the documentation aloud. It is easiest to see with the Open Source projects – just jot down few phrases and Google for it. If it is the case – do not bother any further.

Presenter just lists the topics/terms/functions not explaining Why (we need to know it or its function in the whole topic) / What (this function/term means or does) / How (it does what it does or how we use it). Instead, the course turns into “now we’ll do this, now we’ll do that, do you follow me?” Yes we do, but we don’t know why and for how long.

Presenter forces us to watch his/her mediocre typing skills. “Wait, is this an IT course or How I first met my keyboard ?”. The respectful of our time teacher will cut the typing out of the video.

Presenter does not edit out ‘Hmm’, ’Err’, ’You know…’ and no, having English as not your first language is not an excuse. The only exception in turning your course into ‘Mmm mmm mmm’ song is if you are actually “Crash Test Dummies” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIbcqgXh5-4

‘Death by PowerPoint’, especially for technical topics in IT, when a lecture becomes endless queue of the PP slides, I start to suspect the presenter skipped the example/showcase part because he/she doesn’t know to do what she/he is speaking about.

Surprises are good for the horror movies, not courses. I can put up with some unexpected events during the course and it is a norm for some debug topics or inevitable for live casting. But for the most topics when a presenter is constantly surprised with the result of his/her own actions in the video I can’t help but think: “ Whaat? You say A will happen but B happens instead again and again, do you know what you are talking about at all?”

Call 911, the author is trying to hurt us! These are few of the creative ways authors try to harm our health and senses and make absolutely sure I stop watching this piece of ‘art’:

      - Bright stinging our eyes background like red/blue/yellow/cyan terminal or any ‘cute/I am cool’ combination of colors and font families.

      - Minuscule fonts which should be read on any plasma TV of 100 inch and larger.

      - Blast from the past resolution of 320/480/640.

      - Bad audio. No, laptop built-in mics do not fit the bill. Also do not blast my ears nor make me turn my volume 300% up.

      - Trying to force me to install some 3rd party codec from a dingy website.

- Background music (I have Youtube for that).

‘Fix-it Felix’ is me. It is OK occasionally to stray from the course topic and fix unexpected problems, but it is NOT OK to make fixing problems the main topic of the course. It goes like “In our course about the Wireshark let’s install the Wireshark first. Hmm, it gives an error about missing dependencies, I’ll fix it now by installing the night-built version, looks good, Oh! The driver refuses to work with this version, let’s take the driver from another distribution, great, just reboot and we’re good. Oh no, not booting up … You know what? Let’s switch the operating system. By the way, does anyone still remember what course am I trying to record here?”

See attached code/samples/examples. What, you don’t see it? Well, it is because they are not there. When a course includes additional assets for download, the first thing I do before even starting the course is to download those materials, and if they are not available, guess what – I move on to another course.

Trying to cheat on the course dates intentionally. I don’t hold authors accountable for the dates of course creation or publishing, but I do mind when authors ‘fix’ the dates to trick us into believing their course is more up-to-date than it actually is. It is also useless – setting the date on the course as 2017 and then presenting the software/technology which is clearly from the year 2010 cannot be hid.

I am Chris Rock, am I? I love hearing real life stories ‘from the trenches’ related to the topic of the course and even better if they are funny, but please, refrain from telling me jokes about your wife/friends as it wastes my time and will get you in trouble with both of them, a lose-lose situation.

That’s all I could recall at this time of the Friday, hope it was helpful and have a great weekend, arrivederci.