Hi there,
I am a new member of CompTIA Instructor Network. I am an electronic engineer, I have various IT Security certifications: CompTIA Security +, CEH, CHFI, CASE.NET, ISACA CSX-P. I am also a CEI EC-Council trainer. I ask for information on what is the procedure to become an official CompTIA trainer to do online teaching for CompTIA or CompTIA training partner ?. Can anyone give me some information?
thank you
Gianluca

Greetings, check out the latest CompTIA publication.

What is DDos? A Guide for Protection

Enjoy!

Thank You

Lat week's webinar was very successful! Thank you to everyone who attended and supported the event!

During our first webinar on this subject, dozens of instructors requested we address additional items in a follow-up session. Frankly, we ran out of time covering all the challenges that COVID-19 has introduced to classroom teaching.

We are continuing the discussion on April 2nd! During our lively, interactive webinar our panel including, @Stephen P, @Lee McWhorter and Jason Eckert, will share proven tips and solutions that work in today’s virtual environment.

Our panel of seasoned IT instructors will:

• Share student engagement tips
• Demo a virtual platform
• Discuss student connectivity solutions
• Q & A with our panel of instructors

The CompTIA Instructor Network is here to provide you with valuable resources as we all tackle the challenges of moving the classroom virtual. Please help promote the webinar to any teachers who may be interesting in learning more about moving their classes online!

Registration: https://bit.ly/TeachingVirtual2

Quarantines and stay-home notices means we scrape the bottom of the YouTube barrel. So, this goes out to @Stephen P :

• Pachelbel's Chicken
• Chicken Wedding
• Chickens in Africa
• The Blue Danube (Chicken Edition)

Enjoy, and stay save everyone.

/r

CySA CS0-002 launches April 21st. Please join CompTIA's product and marketing team for this informative webinar to be held at 10:00 am CDT on April 22nd. Register here.

We will discuss:

What is it?
CompTIA Cybersecurity Analyst (CySA+) is an IT workforce certification that applies behavioral analytics to networks and devices to prevent, detect and combat cybersecurity threats through continuous security monitoring.

Why is it different?

• CompTIA CySA+ is the only intermediate high-stakes cybersecurity analyst certification with both hands-on, performance-based questions and multiple-choice questions.
• CySA+ focuses on the candidate's ability to not only proactively capture, monitor, and respond to network traffic findings, but also emphasizes software and application security, automation, threat hunting, and IT regulatory compliance, which affects the daily work of security analysts.
• CySA+ covers the most up-to-date core security analyst skills and upcoming job skills used by threat intelligence analysts, application security analysts, compliance analysts, incident responders/handlers, and threat hunters, bringing new techniques for combating threats inside and outside of the Security Operations Center (SOC).

Any TTT for CySA+?

Today many of us find ourselves moving from our comfortable classroom instruction to teaching online. This could be a challenge on many fronts and you may have questions about how to proceed, what tools to use, and tactics to engage students.

We have assembled a webinar panel of instructors, @Stephen P, @Lee McWhorter and Jason Eckert, who teach classroom-based instruction and as well as virtual courses. They will share with you tips and tricks for moving beyond the classroom with their students, and lessons learned along the way.

We will also take questions from the audience and provide answers and support for teachers trying to get classes up and running with little prep time.
Please join us for this informative webinar.

To find out more information and register, please visit, https://event.on24.com/wcc/r/2238667/09C996BCE81D2B6C902D490880190395

We hope to see you Thursday!

Need to brush up IT skills or know someone who does? What a better way to spend self-imposed quarantine then working towards certification for free!

CompTIA and BenchPrep are offering access to CompTIA IT Fundamentals+ course for the next 30-days. Check out the details, https://www.comptia.org/newsroom/pr...on-the-fundamentals-of-information-technology

Pass it along.

As detailed below, I have been involved in a project that provides instructors and their students to a free online course that is aligned with the exam objectives for the ITF+ certification. The course is free because the development was funded from a grant I administered that was provided by the California Community College Chancellor's Office. You can look at the course content by registering for a student account by clicking HERE. The course is housed in the Canvas LMS. You can establish your own free "teacher" Canvas account by clicking HERE. You can download the ITF+ course content and load it into your Canvas account by clicking HERE.

The course development team consisted of two community college faculty and a high school teacher. There is a cost associated with the labs identified in the course. Those labs are provided by Practice-Labs. If you want to provide student access to the labs, I recommend you reach out to Practice-Labs. The recommended audience would be high school and community college students. This could be a great way to give back to your community and get students who are "sheltered at home" during these trying times.

Let me know if you have any questions. My email address is [email protected]

Steve

You may have already seen the letter from CompTIA's CEO, Todd Thibodeaux about moves CompTIA is making in response to COVID-19. In case you have missed it here is the basics.

CompTIA exams will be available for remote delivery beginning approximately 30 days from today. Please use the link below and register to receive continuous updates regarding remote testing availability. We also recommend you share this link with candidates.

https://www.comptia.org/testing/online-testing-interest-form

Any previously purchased vouchers will be usable with the remote system and all vouchers scheduled to expire from March 17th through April 30th, 2020 will be extended through June 30th, 2020. We'll continue to monitor timelines and make further adjustments for other periods if warranted.

I am excited about the changes being made and look forward to the online testing. Check back for status updates as I will post them here as they become available!

As some of you know effective June 30, 2020, I am retiring from the California community college system. One of the consequences of retiring is that I cannot teach for California's public educational institutions for a period of 180 days (meaning until after December 30, 2020). After that date, I can begin teaching and because I want to stay off of California freeways, I've decided to focus efforts on qualifying as an online instructor, available to serve our California students. To do that I must satisfy college requirements, which include completing training as an online instructor. I wish they were uniform, but with 115 colleges and 72 districts, uniformity is out of the question. The best way to go is for me to take an online course provided by @One. This 12-week course will enable me to teach online IT/cybersecurity courses as a majority of the colleges. My sense is this current situation will result in the online courses will increase and after the emergency will continue to be more commonplace as students get use to being training in this manner.

Thought you might be interested!

Hello Everyone: Due to the impacts of COVID-19, all CompTIA exam vouchers with an original expiration date between March 17th, 2020 to April 30, 2020 are now valid through June 30, 2020. CompTIA will continue to monitor timelines and any additional updates will be communicated.

*Please note for the latest information on certification exam test delivery and testing policies pertaining to COVID-19, please refer to the Pearson VUE update site.

Please post or reach out with any questions.

Best,
Liz

See: https://home.pearsonvue.com/coronavirus-update

Darn. I was scheduled to take the beta exam for the Server+ on March 26th. I wonder if I'll be permitted to take it at a later date......

We are experiencing crazy times! So many schools are closing down and many schools are having Spring Break this week uncertain or knowing they will not return to the classroom next week. This may be a challenge to many face-to-face instructors having to switch to a virtual platform for teaching with zero prep time.

We have a great blend of teachers in this community. It would be great if our virtual instructors would share some tips and tricks for getting course up and running quickly. Thanks to @Steve Linthicum for sharing the resources he found for special offers of virtual training services. This is a great start. What other advice can we offer to support teachers facing this task. Suggestions for best practices, tools to use, advice for student engagement, how to for creating screen-casts, or over all suggestions to help students provide guidance to their students.

I know this is a great community! Let's stand together and help each other out!

Greetings,

In addition to all the great resources @Steve Linthicum mentions, CompTIA also has a valuable Free Resource called The Future of Tech. Here you will find content idea for providing students with baseline digital literacy and familiarity with emerging technologies. This content is aimed at the "Fundamentals" course. On this site you will find the following 5 Lessons, plus 2 bonus Lessons.

Future of Tech Topics/Lessons:

• Big Data
• AI
• IoT
• CyberSecurity
• Digital Health

Bonus Collections/ Lessons:

• Ethics in Tech
• Personal Data Ownership

Each lesson is organized with reading, video and interactive exercises. There is no formal assessment, however would be idea to assign a written assignment or team-based assignment. This content is also ideal if you have eLearning classroom which may not have access to all of the right "applications" at home and you need to switch gears.

For those teaching courses geared towards our CompTIA certifications, you have access to the following eLearning options include:

1.) CertMaster Learn (both self-study and instructor-led versions) fully scoped and sequenced course (with or without the instructor admin tools)
2.) CompTIA labs (hosted on Learn on Demand Systems)
3.) CertMaster Practice (certification exam prep)

Please let us know if you need help with your course. You can contact [email protected] or post here and we will get in touch with you ASAP.

Thanks so very much!

Best,
Liz Wannemacher
[email protected]

I received the following information from a LinkedIn colleague that may be worth sharing with your faculty colleagues:

Many educational institutions are moving their face-to-face classes to online to help slow the spread of COVID-19. I am finding out that many EdTech companies are postings free or extended trial offers to educators impacted by these. I compiled a few that I was able to find. If you have any to add please let me know.

Free courseware from Wiley: https://lnkd.in/e_hGuUp

Expanded feature for the Free Webex Personal account: https://lnkd.in/edYiduy

Removal of the 40-minute limit for Basic Zoom account for users in certain countries: https://lnkd.in/eyEEWQp

Microsoft Office 365 E1 6-month Trial: https://lnkd.in/eERUkHX

Premium features of Google Hangouts Meet until July 1, 2020: https://lnkd.in/eTvms_V

Loom Pro free for education: https://lnkd.in/ethvjHm

Free access to TechSmith Snagit and Video Review through June 30, 2020: https://lnkd.in/enrirQw

Three months free RingCentral: https://lnkd.in/erGfWtP

Free access to Coursera course catalog: https://lnkd.in/e6rhM78

Steve Linthicum, JD, CISSP
Professor Emeritus
Orange County Region Director - Business Engagement
Information and Communications Technologies / Digital Media
Powered by California Community Colleges
(916) 300-7602
Email: [email protected]
https://ictdmsector.org/Join from PC, Mac, Linux, iOS or Android: https://cccconfer.zoom.us/j/801335390

Earlier this week I attended a panel discussion at Mira Costa Community College. The panel discussion centered upon what the industry representatives thought we should be teaching. Below is a subsequent email discussion I had with one of the industry representatives. I think it would interest CIN members. I'd appreciate your feedback.

Email from Steve Linthicum (CCCCO) to William Figueroa (Viasat)

I wanted to talk about concerns I have with community colleges continuing to focus on hardware and a belief I have that it probably makes sense to move away from the hardware courses and focus on cloud computing. That belief is contained in an article I wrote that was published last month by Certification Magazine (link provided above).

As noted in the article, I'm "retiring" on June 30th from the California community college system. Rick Cassoni has asked that I teach for Mira Costa (specifically their Cisco CCNA class and possibly their Security+ related class), something I cannot do until the Spring 2021 because of a requirement to take 6 months off. Based upon where I believe things are headed, I'm not sure students will achieve a ROI (return on instruction) benefit from taking the Cisco line of courses that are focused on its router and switch line of products. A stronger benefit in my opinion would be focusing on gaining an understanding of cloud computing, with a focus on AWS and Azure. That is a direction I'm focused on as evidenced in my recent blog postings.

I'd appreciate your thoughts.

Steve

Response from Wilson Figueroa

I would generally agree with those statements, but there are some things to keep in mind.

• We do design equipment that is self-contained and requires the use of routers and switches, but that is much less today.
• I think students need to have a very good understanding of TCP / IP and protocols and how that all works.
• If they need Cisco or Juniper Certs – those are offered by schools and online.

We are finding that multi-cloud is not only a nice to have, but a need to have.

• The different cloud providers appear to be specializing in different things and you now choose the one that has the best tools for your use case.
• We have our own private cloud using Rackspace and enterprise equipment, plus we use Azure, AWS, and GCP.
• There are many security arguments for multi-cloud – like eliminating vendor lock-in, the ability to easily move containerized apps to different cloud providers, supporting different regions around the world, better support for real-time work (like Kubernetes with Google cloud).

What is similar is that each cloud provider has a shared security model. Students should be taught what that means, how you set up security services and how you monitor those. For example, how do you look and interpret CloudWatch and CloudTrail logs in addition to your private cloud and enterprise logs.

Also, CC is now shifting to things like Lambda Function (Serverless) and we already run what are called immutable containers. The tools, SecDevOps (or DevSecOps), DevOps and cloud tools are growing at a fast pace. I even suspect that Quantum Computers will be time-shared and you will access those over the cloud.

So, I think it is critical to teach students to de-emphasize the hardware and learn the way of the cloud because it will continue to grow in breadth (cloud services and tools), tools and use for everyone as today companies want to focus on their platform as opposed to the smaller view of their products.

Thanks ~Wilson

Good afternoon,
I have taught many CompTIA classes (A+, Neworking+. and Security+) and now looking forward top jump into the CompTIA CySA+ pool.
I am looking forward to taking the Train the Trainer program.

It is nice to meet you all.

Just a quick note that our previous Cloud Essentials+ certification (001) is retiring on May 12th. Let me know if you need any help with resources to help you prep for (002). Thanks! Liz

Below is a link to an article I wrote earlier this week that relates specifically to the actions of Microsoft in retiring a series of somewhat dated certifications. It should be noted that retirement includes eliminating the MCSE branding, something that's been around since the '90s.

As most of us know, in June 2019, Cisco made a decision to drastically modify its certification offerings, eliminating the CCENT foundational certification and changing its CCNA and CCNP certification tracks. The Cisco and Microsoft decisions, as near as I can tell, were made without asking for input from the instructor community. Thoughts?

I am busy prepping to write the CS0-001 exam on the 2nd of April 2020.
I have been running through the Instructor manual(s) to set up the lab environment and so far I am getting things right.
What do/did you use to prep for this monster?

See: https://scccd.peopleadmin.com/postings/3090