Nearly Free Training…
My current topic of interest is Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) in relation to Oracle E-Business Suite, and while I’ve read quite a bit about it I’ve not been lucky enough to be involved in it on a project yet; so I thought I should check out some training available on it.
Now the problem with training for us is that the cost is two fold; the cost of the training itself and the far more expensive cost of lost earning days. I’m lucky enough to be working at the moment and while it would seem like training while you’re not working is a good idea, in these recession hit days the cost of expensive training courses doesn’t look appealing when you’re not working. So the ideal for me is training courses at the weekends.
So I found an on-line training course provided by FocusThread which not only promised weekend training, and to keep the costs down working on-line from home but also were very reasonably priced to boot. Now call me cautious, but sending money to someone before I know what I’m getting is not in my nature and so I thought I’d try a course that wasn’t too expensive and also that I knew about to evaluate the course before I spend any real money.
So I thought I’d use the OA Framework Extensions course as a refresher course; the standard OA Framework full course was 7 days split across 3 weekends ($699), but for my test I chose the last weekend which was dedicated to Extensions and was $299 (this has now gone up to $399). There were 12 people on the course from around the world and even on my usually poor ADSL connection from home the voice and images were fine. The training was given using Gotomeeting for both Voice Over IP and the viewing of the trainer’s PC, and all the other attendees could be seen and interacted with via chat and voice although we were all (thankfully) muted for most of the time. The trainer, called Bipul, was knowledgeable and obviously seemed to do this for a living during the rest of the week, and it worked just like a real-world training course in that interactions from the other trainees enhanced the experience.
I didn’t need to write any training notes as Bipul did this for us; I mean he literally wrote the notes for us as he trained us, which at first seemed very annoying; why had he not prepared the notes before and just sent them? It actually proved useful to learning as he reiterated the ideas more slowly as he typed the notes up, and it gave me time to think of any questions, it saved me typing and everyone got a copy of these actual notes that we used during the course.
So no complaints on the content - good material and a knowledgable trainer; the only aspect that could have been improved was that there were not enough hands on exercises for us to do, but otherwise good value! So although not really nearly free, it seemed like the next best thing and I’m planning on checking out the courses on BPEL and ADF next. (BTW, I’m not associated with this lot in any way)