Is this forum still alive?

Hi Dan! I'm alive and would love to compare notes

Dan.Morrill said:

Hello Everyone,
So I do teach at a couple of colleges, one full-time and one part-time, and both are heavily CompTIA A+, N+, and Sec+. Like all colleges I've seen lately, it's all Cengage and Jill West all the time.
If this forum is still alive and anyone is interested, do you want to compare notes?

The biggest challenges I'm seeing right now are having students do the labs, which can take 20 minutes to an hour (ACI Labs), depending, and in a world of TikTok-induced ability to focus, that might be an issue.

If not, just saying Hi!
Dan

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If they can't focus, they may not be cut out for this line of work.

Gregory Childers said:

If they can't focus, they may not be cut out for this line of work.

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Exactly! Someone with focus will eat their TikTok loving lunch while they watch their videos and complain how long the Food Bank line is...smh

I start my class with a slide of two lines.

One line is going into a Food Bank/Homeless Shelter and the other is at a Job fair. I then say your ability to have discipline, focus and finish your education will determine which line your going to stand in.

Yep, we're still going out here. Probably not as much chatter as of late, but I still check in generally once a day, as others do.

Would love to get some more chatter going, of course. Real stuff, not noise...etc etc....

Happy Tuesday masquerading as a Monday (at least for the US and a few other places....)

/r

Dan.Morrill said:

Yah, but we don't get much of a choice on who we teach, we just have to teach them to the best of our ability. And focus is a thing, do you have any ideas on how to improve focus for students? Could they put on some lo-fi concentration music, maybe from YouTube?

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I tell them they have two choices:

Focus and work hard, or AI will take your job

Dan.Morrill said:

Yah, but we don't get much of a choice on who we teach, we just have to teach them to the best of our ability. And focus is a thing, do you have any ideas on how to improve focus for students? Could they put on some lo-fi concentration music, maybe from YouTube?

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Hi Dan,

I teach college as well and yes, they have trouble focusing. Many of my students are on the spectrum and many have ADD or ADHD, so I feel your frustration. I've some on the spectrum that once they 'get into it' their focus is good; others get so frustrated they quit (mostly because of the theory courses like SAD). In my face-to-face classes when they are doing the labs, I do play concentration music from YouTube. Some I let listen to their own music (as long as they are continuing to work) with headphones or earbuds, but it has to be so that I can't hear it. I've usually learned their habits and abilities by the end of their first semester and know who can listen to their own and who can handle the YouTube music. I play the classics (Mozart, Beethoven, etc); by the third semester they might request music (no lyrics of course) and as long as it's not heavy metal or hard rock, I'll play it. I've also found 'programming' music and other tech concentration music. When there's a challenging lab, we do it as a class (or whoever needs to do it with help).
Hope this helps.

Hi Dan,
It's easy to see how this has become a widespread challenge for instructors. Student engagement now requires more than delivering content. It requires relevance. I usually connect lab activities to real job adverts so students can clearly see how each skill is demanded and how it applies in the workplace. By linking labs to actual job descriptions, students shift from passive learning to understanding how their work prepares them for employment. It takes extra effort to do things this way, but it significantly improves motivation, focus, and real-world readiness.

Dan.Morrill said:

Yah, but we don't get much of a choice on who we teach, we just have to teach them to the best of our ability. And focus is a thing, do you have any ideas on how to improve focus for students? Could they put on some lo-fi concentration music, maybe from YouTube?

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Excellent remark. You have the play the cards you are dealt. I've taught traditional and non-traditional students in higher education and proprietary schools. From a focus standpoint, you have to meet them where they're at. For me, it asking about their majors or interest in the IT field. During lectures and labs, I've used their interests to zero in on specific areas. Their attention is drawn in and maintained because it ties into current goals, and aspirations.

I've also noticed that students nowadays want to magically become proficient in a skill without putting in any effort. This could be partly generational (the lost COVID generation from high school), and partly due to societal and technological (AI) changes. But I find there are only 2 types of motivation, and the one that works best today is the one on the right :

Dan.Morrill said:

Interesting,
What I'm getting from this is failure is still a pass, you don't have to apply yourself to get the pass in an educational setting. Interesting idea, any ideas on how to bring that back to the real world where work is tied to KPIs is tied to performance and failure is a thing that gets you written up depending on company culture?
Dan

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This is why we've shifted nearly all of our assessments to practical ones in our IT programs years ago (and are moving closer to 100% each year). There are several reasons we decided to do this:
1. It aligns to the program outcomes (job-ready skills).
2. It prevents students who don't spend the time to build the practical skills a course teaches from passing it.
3. It encourages students who wouldn't otherwise spend the effort to do the lab exercises to actually do them (building confidence and motivation in the process that eventually grows throughout the program).

Of course, there are always a small cohort that won't ever do the labs. But this is the group that terminate their program for whatever reason (failure, attendance, etc.) and I think that we'll always see a certain number of them in the college.

Great discussion and helps me stay grounded and happily retired.....

Dan.Morrill said:

Hello Everyone,
So I do teach at a couple of colleges, one full-time and one part-time, and both are heavily CompTIA A+, N+, and Sec+. Like all colleges I've seen lately, it's all Cengage and Jill West all the time.
If this forum is still alive and anyone is interested, do you want to compare notes?

The biggest challenges I'm seeing right now are having students do the labs, which can take 20 minutes to an hour (ACI Labs), depending, and in a world of TikTok-induced ability to focus, that might be an issue.

If not, just saying Hi!
Dan

Click to expand...

Still here and able to share Security+ notes. Funny, I thought Twitter was responsible for the short attention spans

Shea Bennett said:

Exactly! Someone with focus will eat their TikTok loving lunch while they watch their videos and complain how long the Food Bank line is...smh

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I want to jump in here and say that we, as instructors, are part of the problem. We need to not be boring and know our stuff. Death by PowerPoint or excessive rambling is not helpful.

As much as possible, have the learners doing. If they are doing, then it is hard for them to focus on other things. Learning about firewalls, set them up, and test them (I like to redirect outgoing connections to a different place or block them). Learning about Linux, let's log in and run some commands.

Oh, viruses... Let's write one, get you to download it from the internet, look at your internet downloads from my command-and-control system in front of the class, and then reboot your system, partially to clear off my virus. (I warn the student beforehand what I want to do and let them object if they do no want me to)

At the end of every semester I ask myself a bunch of questions. Two of them are: who did not get an A that I thought they should have, and why was that. Also, who passed the class who shouldn't have, and why? Then I adjust my classes to try and fix those.

If we are relying on labs only in the ebooks, then we are failing our students. Most of those labs do not have them properly log in.

So, we as instructors should be doing more. I have much of my Linux course on YouTube for my students and anyone else. We start day one doing SSH keys and logging in so that they can play. Then we log into a Linux system remotely 95% of the days in class, and all the assessments are hands-on. I use Red Hat Academy for ebooks and labs that they can do outside of class. We do very little with Red Hat Academy in class. The ebook is there to augment the in-class learning and let them do more.

Here is my custom Linux content -

I would like to get more of my classes to this level, but the number of courses and my other load make it hard. But I stand by the fact that we, as instructors, are part of the reason our students are bored and disengaged. We, as instructors, can do better.

Dan.Morrill said:

Hello Everyone,
So I do teach at a couple of colleges, one full-time and one part-time, and both are heavily CompTIA A+, N+, and Sec+. Like all colleges I've seen lately, it's all Cengage and Jill West all the time.
If this forum is still alive and anyone is interested, do you want to compare notes?

The biggest challenges I'm seeing right now are having students do the labs, which can take 20 minutes to an hour (ACI Labs), depending, and in a world of TikTok-induced ability to focus, that might be an issue.

If not, just saying Hi!
Dan

Click to expand...

For A+ and N+ content, we are currently using Cisco Network Academy content. It is okay and free. We augment it with some of our own materials. The A+ class is really packed, and they don't have much time to be bored. It is a 3-credit class. I have seen people use this content and do it in 4 or 5 10-hour days for a boot camp, so there should be room for it in a 3-credit, 120-hour-expected course. We tack on AWS Academy Cloud Practitioner content to the A+ course as Cisco Net Academy lacks good cloud content.

We are building the Security+ Course now. We have a CYSA+ and CEH/Pentest+ aligned courses (Using Ucertify for those, then augment with custom content). For Security+, we are going to use

CompTIA Security+ (SY0-701) Certification Companion​

Hands-on Preparation and Practice Guide -
Authors:

• Kodi A. Cochran ,
• Kyle Reis
  

We chose this for a few reasons. The main ones are that it is current, good enough, and our library has purchased it, so students can download the ebook for free.
I am currently working on the in-class custom engagements.
Since alot of us like videos... Here are videos about some of the content providers I have listed above.

RedHat Academy -
Ucertify -
AWS Academy -