Quality Materials

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 notes as to what version various features were introduced
- We regularly get the updates for 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 an IBM system in Dallas for testing and development
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 matter

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

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