Wednesday, November 29, 2006

Microsoft Official Distance Learning (MODL) Announced

A cool new way of learning Microsoft Technologies has been announced recently... I have personally seen the experience and it is pretty exciting... A real world environment is created remotely and a student is tought as if he/she was working on that problem in his/her office...
All of this is done remotely so you do not need to travel far away to learn from the best Microsoft Certified Trainers (MCTs) in the world...

Check out these links

Lutz Ziob's video on MODL

Europe Annoucement

On IT News Online

On Playful's.com

On ManufactingTalk.com

2 comments:

Ben Watson said...

Hey Vishal,

It is great to see Microsoft finally recognize the power of live online learning. On the other hand it is disappointing to see that MODL is essentially replicating the classroom experience rather than taking advantage of the benefits of the Internet to create a solution that combines the best of the traditional classroom (the instructors) combined with the ability to enable continuous learning. I'm not too sure about your comment on learnign form the best MCTs in the world - they are simply instructors from the traditional classroom so some are good and some not so good. Alot depends on the quality of the instructor.

At Thomson NETg, we have doing live online classes for several years with hundreds of thousands of hours of online classes having been delivered (we acquired the market leader KnowledgeNet back in 2004). Probably the most unique aspect of what we do is that we use a team of two dual instructors in every online class allowing us to teach the equivalent of a 5 day ILT course in 6 3hr sessions spread out over 3 weeks (plus we never cancel a class!). Recordings of each class are available for review or self-paced learning along with 24×7 access to online mentors to answer any questions you may have outside of class.

What I find interesting is that the cost of the Microsoft kits for their online classes is HIGHER than the equivalent ILT kit - that’s nuts - online classes should be able to take advantage of the cost savings inherent in using the Internet and pass those savings along to the learner. Heck, even with 2 top gun instructors in every class Thomson NETg sells it’s online classes at $1295 (SRP)! In any case I can’t even find anyone providing MODL classes.

But in the end the quality of the live learning experience will speak for itself - check out a recording of a live NETg online class at
http://www.netg.com/livedemo
and view the video bios of our instructors
http://www.netg.com/experts/instructors/

Sincerely,
Ben

Ben Watson
VP, Collaboration
Thomson NETg
ben.watson@thomson.com

Anonymous said...

hi Vishal Bhai,
My name is kamal,I am from Delhi (India)i am a mechanical engineer, presently i am working in SAP MM Module as a functional consultant,I want to be a certified consultant for sap MM Module will you plz give me some information training programme conducted by MS. i shall be highly thankfull to you.
My email ID Is kamalsharmaz@rediffmail.com

i am waiting for your response

With Kind Regards
Kamal
Delhi
cel:9312069454