VMware Edu & Cert Community
VincentHerreman
Community Manager
Community Manager

How are you continuing to work with your students despite to the various measures that are in place?

The coronavirus is forcing a lot of academic and educational institutions to rethink their strategy on how to give their students access to content, knowledge and practical exercises.

In this topic we would like to ask the 2500+ institutions active in both the VMware IT Academy program and the Academic Software License program to share best practices with each other.

So how is your institutions handling the current situation?

And what challenges do you still face?

12 Replies
VincentHerreman
Community Manager
Community Manager

For those smaller institutions that don't have their own LMS running, you might want to look at the free (trial) subscription offers of the big mass online learning providers, and map out a learning path for the students.

There is content available that ranges from technical skills to soft skills.

LinkedIn Learning might be a great starting point: https://www.linkedin.com/learning/me with 1 month of free access.

And while you and the students are on the LinkedIn platform, you might want to follow our IT Academy page: https://www.linkedin.com/school/33294518/admin/  Smiley Happy

VincentHerreman
Community Manager
Community Manager

When we look at providing access to VMware content and labs specifically, we would recommend the following sources:

1. The VMware Learning Zone

The VMware Learning zone is a great source of all types of knowledge with regards to the VMware solutions, and you can try it for free

https://vmwarelearningzone.vmware.com/oltpublish/site/cms.do?view=home

2. The NDG Microcourses

NDG is hosting 3 microcourses that explain the basic concepts of

  1. cloud and virtualization
  2. software defined storage
  3. software defined networking

And at the end your students get to claim a digital badge.

100% free, available to all and 100% online!

Here is the link: https://www.netdevgroup.com/online/courses?vendor=VMware

They offer courses on other information technology topics as well!

3. NDG cloud labs for VMware vSphere ICM and vSphere O&S

If students can't reach your institutions labs from remote, you might want to look at the NDG lab offerings.

While only available for VMware IT Academy program members, they are an affordable solution to a difficult situation.

Link: https://www.netdevgroup.com/online/courses/virtualization/vsphere-icm-labs-6-7

4. VMware Hands-on-labs (HOL)

Free, online, pre configured and available to all .. what's not to like about VMware Hands-on-lab offering? Smiley Happy

HOL offers access to lab environment for just about all of the VMware solutions, and can be a great resource to enable you students to practice from remote.

You can find the HOL landing page here: VMware Learning Platform

VincentHerreman
Community Manager
Community Manager

For Kubernetes, Containers, Software Developer information ... check out this youtube channel: VMware Cloud Native Apps - YouTube

vITAJackie
Contributor
Contributor

There are a lot of companies offering various tools and resources to foster learning while students of all ages are at home, a few I like include:

1) Cisco Webex - https://www.webex.com.br/
Released free video conferences with up to 100 participants
2) Google Meet - meet.google.com
Released for free the recording and streaming of meetings for those who already have free google education account (most schools already have). Meanwhile, the account admin should activate these features.
3) Zoom Platform-https://zoom.us/
This one hasn't announced yet. But it's still an excellent option for meetings up to 40 minutes

In Short:
1) for professional professionals, self-employed teachers, service providers, I advise you to use cisco
2) for teachers and students of schools who use google educate (just see if your institutional email is gmail), it's worth using meet.
3) Finally, it is still a good option to use the zoom platform. Especially if your project is long-term, because it's the cheapest of options.

VincentHerreman
Community Manager
Community Manager

Pluralsight just opened up their extensive course content portfolio for free for the month of April.

https://www.pluralsight.com/search?q=VMware

Reply
0 Kudos
bckirsch
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I'm starting to map to Plurasight, I just wish it went until the end of May.

VincentHerreman
Community Manager
Community Manager

Thanks for sharing bckirsch!

Any content in particular from Plurasight that you are keen to offer your students?

Reply
0 Kudos
GKuria
Contributor
Contributor

Hello,

Learning Continues Online through our VLMS. There are so many systems out there that can be used for this. We use an open source one that accommodates more that 40,000 students.

VincentHerreman
Community Manager
Community Manager

Thanks for sharing GKuria!

Did you have all regular course materials available in your VLMS or are your colleagues/instructors busy recording additional material for the students?

Reply
0 Kudos
GKuria
Contributor
Contributor

Most of the materials were already loaded in the LMS since we have been offering most courses online. The rest lecturers are uploading materials every day. The main challenge is on the practical courses like Medicine, Engineering...any ideas on how we can include simulations and Virtual reality?

Reply
0 Kudos
VincentHerreman
Community Manager
Community Manager

My guess is that for each subtopic there might be a specific simulation tool or remote lab environment that could help.

Like for instance the workstation PRO and fusion licenses that we offer in our academic program that enable students to practice OS deployment on their laptops, without the need to swap hard drives or remove the existing operating system.

If you would like to learn more about what our academic licenses can enable in the teaching space, stay tuned for our upcoming webinars that will explain just that!

We are preparing them to take place this month still.

dmbrooks
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Many public libraries also have LinkedIn Learning/Lynda.com subscriptions at no cost.

So I would investigate that. I have got all my students to sign up with their local library who offer it.

The NDG Micro courses are a great introduction to all the relevant concepts. Definitely worth a look.

Our school term resumes tomorrow, so we're busy preparing for the mayhem that will ensue.

I have spent the last week or so recording all of my PowerPoint presentations, each one no more than 10 minutes on any topic.

We have a Moodle LMS with echo360 hosting the videos.

I'm now recording demonstrations of a lot of the lab activities from the course materials.

Next up I'm going to make some video's on building a home lab using VMware Workstation as nothing beats building the lab from scratch.

I'm hosting live lab sessions on NetLab so students who are struggling can get assistance with me effectively looking over their shoulder.

We are using Microsoft Teams as our primary remote delivery platform, with WebEx as a backup.

Many of my students also have TeamViewer for remote support in the event something isn't working on their own systems.

Our main issue is some students have limited compute capacity at home, or poor internet access.

For the compute issues, i'm working on a nested lab sandbox those students can use to effectively remote control a lab environment to build whatever they need to complete their studies.

We have 500+ students currently doing IT/Cyber security courses, so resource management is critical.

Investigating Azure and AWS through our academic relationships to see what else we can leverage.