How we make our programming courses both time and cost effective
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2011-04-09 04:49:35 - Graham EllisWe specialise in training people in how to program in open source scripting langauges, such as Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby, Lua and Tcl ... and in C and C++ too, which are open source too in their Gnu / Gcc flavour.
Wherever we were based, we need people to travel from far and wide for our courses - many of the subjects we teach are specialised / niche, and so our catchment area is a wide one. For this reason, we provide accommodation during public courses - the rooms in our training centre are of high quality hotel standard, specified with the facilities that the technical business traveller needs - and some 70% of our trainees actually stay with us during the course. See [here] for our accommodation web site.
Time is precious for most of our delegates, and cost is an important factor too. So each of them wants to attend a course that starts at the right place in the subject, runs at a good pace for them, and concentrates on the concepts and techniques that are key to the subject yet hard to learn from a book. Delegates don't want to pay for, and waste their time sitting through, too much marketing hype, nor having the reference manual for the subject being taught read to them. Once they know how to call one function, they can read for themselves - when they need to know - how to call another similar function!
We could run different courses for different groups - one course for delegate who have never programmed before, and another course for delegates who are converting from another language. But we don't - with niche subjects such as ours, the group sizes would be so small that the prices would have to rise significantly, and the courses run less often. Our ideal group size is 4 to 8 delegates for a public course (with 8 being our maximum). So what do we do instead?
• We provide an introductory day - "learning to program in xxxxx" - which helps newcomers establish the basic principles of programming, and doing so in their target language. No learning Pascal when the target is Perl!!
• After the first day, delegates who have programmed before join us - we do a faster start for them, a revision for the novice programmers from day 1, and then run the course as a combined group.
• With a maximum of 8 delegates in total, there's plenty of time during practical sessions for the tutor to help each individual, and the delegates with more experience of programming often find that it's a huge help for them to explain things a second time to the novices as it helps confirm their grasp of the concepts too.
• Practical exercises always cover a certain minimum of of ground ... but are extended to cover useful new ground too for faster delegates. And delegates are encouraged to bring their own data along too so that the practical excersies can reflect their practical application of their knowledge to their own needs.
Public course listing - [here].