dmbrooks's Posts

Hi Team, So I have created both the vSphere 8 ICM and OSS courses. The lecture manual for the OSS course is just a PDF of the PowerPoint slides and missing the actual lecture notes, so you may need to reprint that PDF with the notes enabled. Can I also ask where to locate the lab manuals for both courses? Cheers, David Brooks Box Hill Institute.

Hi Vincent, Access to the lab setup guides would be useful. In the past we have used the NDG supplied labs as well as a custom built topology using the lab build guides that we used to have access to. I was able to replicate the vSphere 6.0 and 6.5 topologies to match the official ICM lab manuals. I have found that some students get more benefit from building the lab out step by step as they have to make it work and troubleshoot any mis-configurations along the way. In one of my Bachelors classes; students have to create an entire NetLab topology from scratch and make a working lab environment as part of a project. Would be nice to be able to match the lab manual in the ICM 7.0 course and see how it goes. We have around 20 hosts here, so have sufficient hardware to accommodate that sort of build. Cheers, David Brooks Box Hill Institute.

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.

At Box Hill Institute, we moved to fully remote delivery in Mid March. My advice for anyone considering this: Record your lessons in advance. Break them down into short digestible topics. This will avoid the students getting bored by long winded talks. It also avoids any potential tech failure that could occur trying to record the lesson live. Record and demonstrate each lab activity, that way if a student gets stuck, they have a walk-through guide they can follow along with. Do a live interactive class as if it was in the classroom to reinforce the above activities. Use discussion forums to get the students sharing their knowledge and keep lines of communication open. We have NetLab so I can also do a live supervision of lab activities.