The worst course in the world

It didn't take us long, but we've already booked our return to Lindos in 2009 :-)

Last week I taught one of the "new" Microsoft CRM courses for the first time, the 8913 "Applications in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0" class, and do you know what? It was absolutely awful - possibly THE worst course I've ever taught. Thankfully the problem wasn't with my delivery - in my opinion - but was related to the manual itself. It would appear that the manual was rush-released before it was ready, so the content doesn't flow at all, but the worst thing is that not a single lab exercise works. Every one of the exercises features what I call placeholder text, so you have instructions like "Log on as [user name] with a password of [password] and create an account in the name of [account name]. [Account name] should have a primary contact of [name of primary contact] and the address of the account should be [address line 1], [address line 2], [city], [state], [zip]." Obviously this isn't great.

So I hit the internet and posted to a newsgroup which is accessible solely to Microsoft Certified Trainers, in which we can report quality issues. I had a rant about the course and over the last couple of days there have been 38 replies, some from trainers agreeing with me, some from Microsoft staff saying the course issues have been internally escalated, and some from trainers saying I should be paid by Microsoft for finding all of these faults (well over 200 in this course alone) and reporting them.

Anyway, Microsoft asked for a copy of my report on the course, which I duly emailed (they also asked for my CV...) and the report has now been uploaded by Microsoft to another newsgroup for trainers to download if they want it, and I also sent them an additional document with fixes for all 22 of the labs, and this has been uploaded too.

What will come of this? Well hopefully the course will be reworked, but there is a possibility that I could be involved in this, hence the CV request. We shall see.

Off to Scarborough tomorrow to talk to a big group of people about SQL 2005 Reporting Services for three days. Should be fun, and I haven't been away for ages. It will give Lou a mini-holiday from me I suppose.

Oh yeah, and I've been thinking about writing too, particularly stories for "The Alphabet Project" mentioned in a previous post. Put it this way: the first two stories exist in full in my head. I just need to write them down. Watch this space.