Thoughts on IT education - the good, bad, and the ugly
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@scottalanmiller said in Thoughts on IT education - the good, bad, and the ugly:
@worden2 said in Thoughts on IT education - the good, bad, and the ugly:
@irj said in Thoughts on IT education - the good, bad, and the ugly:
@worden2 So this is one of those get certified while getting a degree schools like WGU?
Yes and no. I don't think my college is going to start employing "course facilitators" instead of professors, and simply point students to the material and expect them to grind through it. On the other hand, as a 2 year college we're not diving too deep into theory and abstracted concepts because of the time scale we're at. Does that clarify it? I do know one of our graduates is doing the WGU thing right now as part of a BS and is getting their MCSA as part of it. Personally, I think we use the certs as external validation that we're staying relevant, but when I see the A+ and other certs not keeping up (the latest A+ cert finally eliminated floppy drive questions!) I worry we're slipping behind as well.
Certs are not in any way a validation that you are relevant and certainly not ones that are not even in the right field. Certs have a place, a good one, but they are VENDOR TOOLS, not industry ones. It's not appropriate to be using them in an academic setting in any way unless, as you had originally stated, using them as a guide to the "level" of knowledge, but never as a guide to the actual knowledge.
How do you teach IT or Systems Administration without teaching students about any technologies they would be using on the job? You can't administer a System (which is from a vendor) if you don't know anything about it.
So if a course wants to teach Linux or Windows Server administration... Well surely covering many of the things the "vendor tool" covers is a great start... Competencies, measured skills, etc.
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@worden2 said in Thoughts on IT education - the good, bad, and the ugly:
@scottalanmiller said in Thoughts on IT education - the good, bad, and the ugly:
Example, instead of A+ material, you offer Net+ material. Slightly more advanced, way more applicable. They will wash out at the exact same point, but you won't have to waste a whole class for other students in order to do it.
Actually, we had a Network+ class but traded it for a Cisco I class. The A+ has been there the whole time even so.
See, this i feel is quite bad. Net+ plus leans towards being academic in nature - it is a general purpose cert. A Cisco class is, I feel, totally inappropriate in a collegiate setting.
The difference might seem subtle, but is dramatic. The idea of the Net+ is around fundamental IT skills. It's general purpose. It is for all people in IT. It's "understanding how things work."
A Cisco class means you leave this world and it is a mix of advertising / vendor promotion and trade skill around that vendor. Trade class instead of foundation. No longer academic or collegiate in nature. Not appropriate for a university to teach, this is for the ITTs of the world.
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@tim_g said in Thoughts on IT education - the good, bad, and the ugly:
@dustinb3403 said in Thoughts on IT education - the good, bad, and the ugly:
@scottalanmiller said in Thoughts on IT education - the good, bad, and the ugly:
@dustinb3403 said in Thoughts on IT education - the good, bad, and the ugly:
IT education has to be dated, by some amount. If education was bleeding edge, the person teaching the course would be learning the material with the class.
You have to do that to be an IT pro. If the professor isn't learning with the class, you've got a big problem.
Um.. . . read that again. The profession at least needs to know what is going on. Learning is good, but they should be learning the material before the rest of the class.
It's why they are the professor.
My thinking is that.... How is a professor supposed to be an expert on a new technology? It's new for everyone, so everyone will be learning it together. You can't postpone teaching something for 10 years to give professors a chance to become experts on something.
I probably learned Server 2016 professionally before professors even considered it for course material... (just as a simple example)
Exactly. If you want your professors to have lots of experience and time on something, you guarantee that that stuff is ancient by the time that the students graduate.
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@tim_g said in Thoughts on IT education - the good, bad, and the ugly:
@scottalanmiller said in Thoughts on IT education - the good, bad, and the ugly:
@worden2 said in Thoughts on IT education - the good, bad, and the ugly:
@irj said in Thoughts on IT education - the good, bad, and the ugly:
@worden2 So this is one of those get certified while getting a degree schools like WGU?
Yes and no. I don't think my college is going to start employing "course facilitators" instead of professors, and simply point students to the material and expect them to grind through it. On the other hand, as a 2 year college we're not diving too deep into theory and abstracted concepts because of the time scale we're at. Does that clarify it? I do know one of our graduates is doing the WGU thing right now as part of a BS and is getting their MCSA as part of it. Personally, I think we use the certs as external validation that we're staying relevant, but when I see the A+ and other certs not keeping up (the latest A+ cert finally eliminated floppy drive questions!) I worry we're slipping behind as well.
Certs are not in any way a validation that you are relevant and certainly not ones that are not even in the right field. Certs have a place, a good one, but they are VENDOR TOOLS, not industry ones. It's not appropriate to be using them in an academic setting in any way unless, as you had originally stated, using them as a guide to the "level" of knowledge, but never as a guide to the actual knowledge.
How do you teach IT or Systems Administration without teaching students about any technologies they would be using on the job? You can't administer a System (which is from a vendor) if you don't know anything about it.
So if a course wants to teach Linux or Windows Server administration... Well surely covering many of the things the "vendor tool" covers is a great start... Competencies, measured skills, etc.
Well the first thing is that a course in college should not be teaching Linux or Windows administration, that's a trade school's job. They should be teaching concepts of administration. Now, that said, they need operating systems to use for that. But teaching concepts instead of specifics is the core concept of academic work and is very different than teaching to a vendor cert.
Remember collegiate academic work isn't for the purpose of teaching on the job skills, but to teach someone the fundamentals and concepts so that those specific skills will make sense. You aren't teaching them which button to push, but why a button like it needs to be pushed.
Example... you don't learn details of NTFS and ReFS, but you do learn file system concepts so that when someone tells you the details of NTFS and ReFS you can immediately understand them and understand other IT concepts when the market changes.
This is a problem I see with most college grads. Instead of learning IT concepts, they just memorize the motions to go through to accomplish a task. They are only trained to follow a script, they don't understand why they do things or what they do means.
