IT sandbox
Give your IT staff a sandbox and watch how nicely they play (and learn).
Problem:Your technology staff learns best by doing. But letting them tinker with your company's network could bring down the whole show.
Solution: Give them a practice area that's like the real thing in all respects but one: You don't run your business on it.
Sometimes simulations just don't cut it. Rick Lemon, director of technology and instruction at the Boston University Corporate Education Centre, knew this was the case for his Web design and development classes. So he gave them the real thing. Almost. Lemon devised his own e-learning tool, a live Web-hosting environment, called a sandbox.
With the sandbox, the centre's studentsâ€"many of whom are professionals from corporationsâ€"can build Web pages, script server applets, and design databases. If the sandbox goes down, Lemon sees it as a good thing, another way to learn. Unlike simulators, which force students to get the right answers, live servers do exactly what they'd do outside the learning environment when you type the wrong command: They choke. This way, Lemon says, students learn how to troubleshoot.
Lemon's practice serverâ€"a Hewlett-Packard Kayak with 20GB of disk space and 512MB of RAMâ€"is connected to a network with a T1 line. Students can access the sandbox from class or from home if they have a DSL or cable connection. On a typical day several hundred students are logged onto itâ€"and students' sites crash many times a week. But that's how students learn that their code "sucks," says Lemon.
Lemon estimates that it costs $10,000 to buy the necessary hardware and software to build a sandbox. That doesn't count paying someone to maintain the server and add new users. Lemon automated that process by writing a Web-based application that extracts student information from the centre's database to create new user accounts.
If you don't want to do any of it on your own, a hosting service provider can helpâ€"if it's willing to take on the additional risk of downtime on servers that house the learners' Web sites. And although it sounds obvious, Lemon advises, be sure your Web host can provide the applications your tech staff has to learn. "Don't let the purchasing department buy this on their own," Lemon warns.
BU doesn't develop all its e-learning solutions itself. Like most companies, it relies on several e-learning vendors to fill gaps in its courses and save money. Through Knowledge Net, BU has access to MentorLabs' online labs, which allow students to practice setting up routers in six of its Cisco certification programs. Live router labs cost about $350 per student. And the online mentors who answer students' questions 24 hours a day cost $195 per student for a six-week course. Those costs are on top of the $1,595 fee for a typical Knowledge Net live course.
Though it's affiliated with a major university, BU's Corporate Education Centre is actually a business. In other words, if it wastes employees' time, it wastes its own money. About four years ago, the centre began using e-learning to make better use of its instructors' time and experience, says Andy Kelley, the centre's associate executive director. Students in its Computer Career Programs classâ€"a course for people looking to enter the IT fieldâ€"were coming in with varying degrees of computer experience. Each time, the centre's highly paid instructors had to start from scratch, teaching everybody how to use a mouse in class.
With e-learning developer SyberWorks, BU created an Internet-based primer that tracks students' progress with pre- and post-lesson tests. Three to four weeks before an in-class course starts, students receive an e-mail message directing them to the online course. Text, graphics, and simulators introduce such basics as the parts of a CPU along with more complex topics like hexadecimal codes. By the time they enter the instructor-led classroom, most of the students are on the same page. But for those who are still struggling, the instructor has a snapshot of their performance and is prepared to give them extra help in person.
John Laycock, a systems administration student at the centre, says that using the Net-based program before going to class gave him "better hands-on experience than the textbook." But, he says, the in-class experience is not to be missed.
