I noticed that your book serves as a basis for your courses, naturally. (There, I mentioned the book, am I eligible to win one now? )
I was wondering if you'd ever considered developing online courses, or have already. What are your thoughts on teaching distance online courses?
Well, a couple of thoughts:
I already put PDF of the course materials online for free access. See
http://courses.coreservlets.com/Course-Materials/.
I already put PDF of the complete first edition of the book online for free access. See http://pdf.coreservlets.com/ I have an online Tomcat "Getting Started" Guide online at http://www.coreservlets.com/Apache-Tomcat-Tutorial/ So, I certainly believe in putting tutorial information online. However, that is not the same as an online
course. Most of the
JSP/servlet training courses I teach are onsite at customer locations, and I like to think that they offer the following benefits:
- I developed them personally, so they (hopefully!) reflect lots of real-world experience and practical how-to and best-practices advice.
- I teach them personally (no contract instructors teaching someone else's materials), so students can ask lots of questions.
- They include lots of hands-on exercises, and I can work with students as they are trying out the exercises to explain the concepts and answer questions about high-level strategies or low-level syntax.
- They can be customized to suit the needs of the client (at least the on-site ones can be; this is a bit harder in the public, open-enrollment courses). For instance, I can add or remove topics such as
Java basics,
Struts, JSTL,
JDBC, and Web application security depending on whether the client needs such material.
Anyhow, I am just not convinced that an online course can capture enough of these distinctives to make an online course significantly better than simply using a book or printed tutorials/guides. So, this is a long-winded way of saying "no" to your question: I plan on continuing to offer printed tutorials/guides/references/books and live personally-taught courses, but not online courses.
Cheers-
- Marty
[ November 11, 2003: Message edited by: Marty Hall ]