Help us Design the Future of Online Red Hat Training Courses!

[dsacco]

For a limited time, we've decided to give this community an opportunity to provide direct feedback on how you use our self-paced, online courses.

My name is Dave and I am a member of the Red Hat Training and Certification team. Part of my job is to make sure that when you take one of our courses, you gain the skills and knowledge needed to feel confident in your role and that your experience is best-in-class.

The results of this survey will help us focus on the elements that are most important to you, our learners, and make updates/enhancements accordingly.

Share your feedback here.

[Deanna]

Thank you Dave - this is a great way for our learning community to help share feedback and shape the way future courses and learning programs are designed! 

[dsacco]

I know, I've been there too. Another survey link?! Ugh! But take a moment to understand how valuable your input is. Your honest responses allow us to:

• Bring feedback directly to the team of writers who create your online courses!
• Make changes to online courses being designed and developed today!
• Improve the customer (your) learning experience with more of what you love and less of what doesn't work.
• Fill our backlog with enhancements that will make a difference in future courses.
• Give you a voice that is heard (directly by me).

So please consider taking the survey above and if you already have (thank you for that!) and pass the link along to those who have taken a Red Hat course. We would love to hear from them!

Questions? Comments? Post them here!

By the way, I see every page of training content that eventually gets to your eyes so you will be responding to someone who can get the information into the right hands. You have so much to gain from that 5 minute commitment! You've got this!

Dave S., Instructional Designer

[rht-ccaillou]

Thanks for sharing the survey, Dave. 

  As a course developer, instructor, and student of our offerings the feedback from those who take our courses are the best way to shape the experiences Red Hat delivers.  As someone who utilizes our courses to upskill in a number of areas, I have often supplied feedback and seen it directly adopted within the course - either from immediate corrections or through the next iteration of the content, depending on the nature of the feedback.  As a student of our training offerings, as well as a developer and instructor of the content, I have personally validated that the feedback offered by our community of learners is...

• Read through and shared with the teams
• Addressed or implemented by Red Hat
• Utilized to determine course objectives, topics, and materials for inclusion
• Revisited as courses evolve through iterations or technology versions

  With the ability to learn so much through the Red Hat course catalog, as well as shape the course offerings and future topics that are addressed with Red Hat offerings, I feel that the delivered experiences are nothing short of world class.  For anyone who has taken training from Red Hat and wanted to see things evolve to meet their specific needs, the opportunity is always available to share your feedback and let your voice be heard. 

  I hope you take the time to share your thoughts with the Red Hat team in this survey, as well as during each and every course, and trust that we are ready to bring you a better experience with each offering by fueling our initiatives with the advice of our community.  Together we will continue to deliver upon the enterprise needs to develop our skills for the ever-changing landscape of our technologies.

[JS_Learning]

Hi @AbsarShaik , Would you share your feedback with RH436 here?

I think it would be very relevant and would allow the opportunity for your to have @dsacco address your concerns to the right team...

[JS_Learning]

Hi @dsacco ,

I'm working for Red Hat also, yet I read numerous feedback from the community on this forum.

Some regular concerns for many following the self paced online course:

1. When they find mistakes with the instructions and or the labs, they are unable to check if the issues are already reported by others. They either notice the problem or waste time reporting. Then the process is slow and they never see the results of them sharing that precious feedback.
2. Unfortunately when they need support, especially for RHLS subscription members, they feel they are ignored. It takes a very long time (weeks or more) for them to get answers. This user @BogdanB can share his own experience on that topic, if willing.

In general, I don't remember having ever heard any negative feedback on the course content from a learning skills aspect. It's more about the support, how to interact with the teams in charge about the course itself.

 I hope that helps,

[BogdanB]

@dsacco 

THis is surely for you. Most courses use a webserver at materials.example.com to host aditional files required for exercises. It would be very useful if that webservers has the Indexes option activate so you could list the directories. The paths are long and since you cannot copy paste from the course the links are prone to typos. 

Another suggestion but I dont know if it is possible, to put a copy of the pdf for the course on the desktop for the student use so you dont need to alt+tab between the lab interface and the manual when you have a single monitor.

[dsacco]

@BogdanB 

With regard to the first part of your question, the default functionality for our classes is that this should be accessible from Firefox on workstation.

For the second part of the question, we are unable to provide a PDF in this manner due to copyright concerns.

I hope this helps,

Dave

[Travis]

@JS_Learning -

I wanted to make you all aware that our JIRA instance you use to create issues with our training (https://training-feedback.redhat.com/) is now publicly viewable by anyone.

This will provide some ability to see errors and issues that have been filed by instructors and others which have been reported to the curriculum team and are in process of being fixed.

Travis

[BogdanB]

@Travis It is great that you are willing to share that. I've tried logging with my RH ID but doesnt work. If the issues should be public I cannot see them.

[Travis]

@BogdanB -

Sorry as I should have been a little more clear. You can view and search issues, but not much more. Therefore, there is no login required. If you want to see any issues, you would perform a search by keywords or issues, or you could look at status of the various projects. There is no login required for this. The login if for Red Hat Instructors and Curriculum Developers to login, update, and resolve the issues.

In this case, I did Projects and Browse Projects to get a project listing.

Project Listing

If you are just looking around, there is no need to login. There is an "Issues" option as well as a search option at the top of JIRA which are also available without a login. Again, the general public cannot login and modify the JIRA, however, searching and browsing has been made publicly available.

Hope this helps,

Travis

[BogdanB]

@Travis 
I've just looked at the issues. Sorry but has been a while since I've used Jira and interface changed a bit. 

I missed to see the top bar:smileyhappy:

It's good you can look at those, you can acctualy see if there already a issue for an error you've discovered. The nice thing I saw in there there are also solutions proposed so if you stuck on command with at typo you can actually move forward even if the issue is not solved yet.

[bonnevil]

Hi there!  I'm one of the technical architects responsible for identifying training needs and objectives, leading the technical design of the courses we offer, and working with our developers to ensure that the courses are technically correct and relevant and in alignment with best practices and supportable solutions.

We routinely collect feedback in a number of ways. For courses in Early Access, we have the feedback form, and for the courses in my area of responsibility I see all of those submissions.  At the end of a course, we have the end-of-course surveys, which focus more on your experience in the class, the educational effectiveness of the content, interactions, as well as your lab experiences.

However, this survey is particularly important because it gives you an opportunity to share information about how you take our self-paced courses, what elements of the course you focus on, and what you'd like to see more of in all Red Hat courses.

Your participation is critical to help my colleagues and I determine what is working, any opportunities for improvement, and features or functions that you'd like to see in courses yet to be created.

Please take a moment to participate!  Thanks.

[BogdanB]

@bonnevil 

This is for you.I hope nobody gets offended but...

I saw alot of wrong checks in the scripts for various courses. The problem is not that they are wrong per se but that they are conceptually wrong. I will explain that.

The scripts dont check the functionality requested but if a certain rule is present somewhere.

I've posted one example here

https://learn.redhat.com/t5/Red-Hat-Learning-Subscription/DO425-Typos-errors-and-bugs/m-p/9515#M1147

It checks if a certain file is identical on the nodes. I did a typo when copy/pasting the file to one node, delete and rewriten the rule at the end but the files didnt match. Guess what? Everything worked as expected but I got a fail because the files didnt match. In that exercise the order of the rules doesnt matter.

In a production environment that file will probably be in a git repo with some linter which would have prevented me the typo.

I've seen this before. I dont know if you must follow some guidelines when you design the script but in that case the I think the person writing the script doesnt understand the file it checks. At least this is my impression.

Perhaps the authors of the course should also write the checks for the labs, probably will avoid errors of such type.

[bonnevil]

@BogdanB Not offended at all. The course grading scripts can be frankly rough in spots, especially the older ones, compared to, say, exam scripts (which are developed by a different team). There are a number of reasons for this, some of which go back to skill sets of individual course developers (they might be really good at instructional writing or teaching how to configure a service using best practices, but weaker at defensively coding grading scripts and considering alternative valid solutions) among other things. 

As you say, if the activity doesn't specify an exact approach, then we have to be very careful about testing functionality.  It also can be very tempting to parse files rather than testing functionality, and that's generally not a great way to check something, especially since the script might parse the file incorrectly.

This is also related to the fact that it's really easy to mess up and only include key information needed to solve a problem in the Solution of a Lab or Comprehensive Review rather than including it in the instructions or the high-leve Lab steps.  Or to assume that there's only one valid solution for an exercise (the exact one written in the book) when the instructions leave room for alternative solutions.  This is especially true when it comes to configuration settings that might be made in any one of several places.

We do take feedback on improper script failures, and the teams have been working to improve responsiveness to address them.  There's also an ongoing discussion of how best to divide up these responsibilities, onboard new developers, define best practices for scripts, and properly validate those scripts.

[BogdanB]

@dsacco 

One thing I've remembered just over a cofee. You have inconsistencies when formating the text. Let's say you have to open http port in the firewall.

One time you get it like this.

Allow service http through the firewall.

Another time you get it written like this.

Allow service http through the firewall.

It makes you wonder why the difference, what did they wanted in the second example ?

It think you should introduce this in you guidelines. Either you highlight the service name  (which I think is a good ideea) or you dont. But not 2 different formats for the same context

[dsacco]

@BogdanB thank you for pointing this out. We are aware there are occasional inconsistencies and are constantly working to improve this aspect of our writing. We are on the case!