Quality in Course Materials

What are the characteristics that show a set of course materials are of high quality? We believe these are the important attributes defining quality in technical training materials:

Content should be accurate, current, appropriate to the level of the audience

• We continually check accuracy of materials, and we challenge our students to verify everything they see in the course materials
  
  
• Our courses always reflect the most current level of the topic under discussion, often with pointers as to what version various features were introduced
  
  
  • We regularly get updates from IBM's publications on their web site and we follow the Usenet groups on the Internet that reflect our various areas of interest
    
    
  • We subscribe to relevant trade publications
    
    
  • We run z/OS on our own system, a Flex-es emulator running on a ThinkPad!
    
    
• We continually refine the topic order, wording, emphasis to match the level of the audience

Whenever possible, there should be labs to reinforce the lecture / discussion

• We always have as many labs as we can, and we order our topics to get to the first lab as quickly as possible, to get students hands on as fast as we can
  
  
• Labs often have starter / skeleton code provided, so students can concentrate on the important aspects of the lab, not the mundane
  
  
• We always have sample solutions to our labs

Materials should have an index (ours always do)

Aesthetics count

• Lots of white space and attractive / sensible arrangement of content on the page make grasping the content that much quicker

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this page last updated: 26 April, 2008
this page copyright © 2008 by The Trainer's Friend, Inc.