Yesterday, Ben Poole and myself presented the XPages101 course which I have designed over the last couple of months to be an introduction to developing with XPages.
Overall it seemed to go pretty well, the timings need some work, I went a little fast at some points which may have left a few people overwhelmed at the fire hose of information we got through in a short period of time! That will not happen again now that I understand how it all hangs together a bit more.
The feedback from the attendees was really gratifying…
Question | Score |
Overall, how would you rate the course? | 95% (between Excellent and Good) |
How was the course material? | 86.67% (between Excellent and Good) |
How was the presentation style? | 86.67% (between Excellent and Good) |
Would you recommend the course to your colleagues / nerdy friends? | Yes: 100% |
Obviously there’s always room for improvement and there were some great feedback comments as well…
“A real eye opener for me as I’ve not looked XPages prior to the course.”
“Excellent value for money. Pitched just right for the first steps into XPages.”
“It gave me a very good understanding of XPages under the bonnet.”
“It was great being here, great course, the XPages start I was looking for.”
One of the things which I had consciously not done was provide lots of handout materials. The aim was to reduce the costs of the course as much as possible. From the feedback it seems people would have been happy to pay extra to get more paper based materials. So I think in future iterations of the course we’ll change that around.
The other area where a couple of people expressed an interest was for an “intermediate” course. This leaves me in a bit of a quandary, as I’m not sure I know what intermediate is. So if you have any thoughts I’d love to hear them.
Overall though, as I said earlier, it was a great day. Good fun for me, and hopefully useful to everyone else.
Looks like a very positive outcome. Let us know when you plan to do one ‘up north’ please.
The intermediate course could be defined broadly as being :
‘the things that those people who attended the basic course struggle with when starting to develop their first few applications in the real world’
so, in a few weeks/months time, ask them how far they got with their own apps, and what issues/barriers are they hitting, and there’s your content for the next level course.
G’Dat Matt,
Interested in how you choose your delivery method. Sounds like you purposefully stayed away from the traditional IBM "lab model" of delivery. Was this intentional? Did you have a look at the IBM course on xPages before running your session?
Do you have a course outline that you can share?
Thanks,
Mat
@John – Thanks for the feedback, that’s useful. I do plan to do a course up North at some point, it’s just a matter of getting the venue and dates sorted out. – so much to do, so little time.
@Mat – I’ve taught the IBM course on XPages several times so I know it works well. The problem is that it costs a fair bit which makes it difficult for independent consultants and small business to justify. The aim with my one day course was to try and cover the basics at as low a cost as possible.
As for the course outline, you’ll see more later in the next few days when I publish the online course details. (I’m still breaking up the lessons at the moment).
Matt
Matt, looks like you have found an effective way to evangelise Xpages for the market. IBM is a little hypocritical on their philosophies and their course offerings seems to typify it.
IBM say they want to reach the SMB market, but until they price it accordingly, it’s one of several self-inflicted barriers to entry. The fact that there is a severe lack of availability of Lotus/Domino courses in the market place speaks for itself.
This is why Microsoft is pulverising IBM in the battle for mindshare, because if you get enough geeks in a room saying, "yeah you can do this in Notes", then you improve your chances of growing your installbase. I’ve looked at a few MS technologies in the collaboration area, and frankly it’s alot more complicated when stacked up against Domino. So, on paper Domino should just be knocking it out of the park.
(Unfortunately) Steve B had a good point when he said "developers! developers! developers!"