I’ve taught two segments of the Rapid Software Testing Online class, so far. For me, it’s working better than I expected. Here are some of the things I’ve learned about online training, so far:

• GoToWebinar is a pretty good system for online training. It’s reasonably inexpensive. I’m going to stick with it unless another vendor comes along with a lot more classroom management features and a similar low price. I also recommend GoToMeeting. It’s a clean and reliable technology.
• The conference calling feature of GoToWebinar seems a little unreliable. Some of my students are complaining about having to call in more than once to make it work.
• I have a touch screen, so I use my pen on my screen a lot. I draw on each slide. I think it creates a little more dynamism while I teach.
• I now put a little webcam window in the corner of the screen. Although the animation of me talking is not quite real-time, it somehow, for most students, creates more of a connection to see a talking head. It’s distracting for other students, but they can cover it up with something if they want to.
• During the first session we had a lot of audio problems, because with 20 people unmuted you hear a lot breathing and typing and background noise. There’s a command to mute everybody’s line, however, and I’ve started to use that liberally.
• A big improvement after the first session is that I’ve established a Moodle course management site for the class. This gives us a place to discuss the lessons in the class, and it also allows me to assign homework and hold chats.
• We used the Moodle chat room to hold a chat simultaneously with my lecture. This worked great for me, because I could take questions and also see comments on what I was saying, without necessarily being interrupted by them.
• I use two screens. One for the presentation, and the other to show the chat session and classroom controls.
• I think a two-hour class session is not long enough. I’m going to expand it to 3 hours and twenty minutes, I think. This gives me more time for exercises. I think it’s more important in online training to have at least one exercise during each session.

A Surprise

The most surprising thing to me about the class is how much MORE involved some of the students are, intellectually, than when I do the class as a three-day event. I think this is a side-effect of splitting the class into pieces and doing them over time, with the Moodle forum providing an ongoing focus for processing what happened.

I’m now feeling pretty enthusiastic about commercializing the online version of the class. It’s more work than the in-person version, but it’s also, I believe, a more valuable learning experience for being stretched over time and allowing more of a dialog.

If you are interested in taking Rapid Software Testing Online, I will start one once I have 15 paying customers. The cost will be $249 per session. Students pay on a session-by-session basis, but each session is a prerequisite for the next. The fee includes access to the class forum.

The course will consist of six to nine 3-hour sessions, starting at 11am EST, scheduled as close to a week apart as I can. I’m working on a new class outline and a schedule to lay all this out.

If you are interested, email me at james@satisfice.com.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 14th, 2007 at 5:50 pm and is filed under Software Testing and Quality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.