@tim_g said in Thoughts on IT education - the good, bad, and the ugly:

@scottalanmiller said in Thoughts on IT education - the good, bad, and the ugly:

@worden2 said in Thoughts on IT education - the good, bad, and the ugly:

@irj said in Thoughts on IT education - the good, bad, and the ugly:

@worden2 So this is one of those get certified while getting a degree schools like WGU?

Yes and no. I don't think my college is going to start employing "course facilitators" instead of professors, and simply point students to the material and expect them to grind through it. On the other hand, as a 2 year college we're not diving too deep into theory and abstracted concepts because of the time scale we're at. Does that clarify it? I do know one of our graduates is doing the WGU thing right now as part of a BS and is getting their MCSA as part of it. Personally, I think we use the certs as external validation that we're staying relevant, but when I see the A+ and other certs not keeping up (the latest A+ cert finally eliminated floppy drive questions!) I worry we're slipping behind as well.

Certs are not in any way a validation that you are relevant and certainly not ones that are not even in the right field. Certs have a place, a good one, but they are VENDOR TOOLS, not industry ones. It's not appropriate to be using them in an academic setting in any way unless, as you had originally stated, using them as a guide to the "level" of knowledge, but never as a guide to the actual knowledge.

How do you teach IT or Systems Administration without teaching students about any technologies they would be using on the job? You can't administer a System (which is from a vendor) if you don't know anything about it.

So if a course wants to teach Linux or Windows Server administration... Well surely covering many of the things the "vendor tool" covers is a great start... Competencies, measured skills, etc.

Well the first thing is that a course in college should not be teaching Linux or Windows administration, that's a trade school's job. They should be teaching concepts of administration. Now, that said, they need operating systems to use for that. But teaching concepts instead of specifics is the core concept of academic work and is very different than teaching to a vendor cert.

Remember collegiate academic work isn't for the purpose of teaching on the job skills, but to teach someone the fundamentals and concepts so that those specific skills will make sense. You aren't teaching them which button to push, but why a button like it needs to be pushed.

Example... you don't learn details of NTFS and ReFS, but you do learn file system concepts so that when someone tells you the details of NTFS and ReFS you can immediately understand them and understand other IT concepts when the market changes.

This is a problem I see with most college grads. Instead of learning IT concepts, they just memorize the motions to go through to accomplish a task. They are only trained to follow a script, they don't understand why they do things or what they do means.