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Culling the weaker members of the herd
Nov. 17th, 2009 02:07 pmThis week I'm taking a class on the new database tool (COGNOS TM1). There are twelve students, and as usual in any class there's one student who just isn't getting it. With every exercise we're all able to follow along with the instructor just fine, but this guy gets lost, so we have to stop and wait while the instructor does a personal tutorial for him, thus everything is taking at least twice as long as it should.
This guy is an experienced DBA, so it's not a question of not knowing how to use computers. The class handouts have written instructions for every step of the labs, plus screenshots of the intermediate and final results, so he should be able to follow along. At this point we're all losing patience with him-- if we were in a classroom he would have never made it back from lunch, but since this is an online class it's too far to drive and hunt him down in person.
And, of course, there's no way for any of us to take the instructor aside privately and ask that they address the issue with him-- our only contact is via a microphone that the entire class hears or chat window that everyone gets to read.
Sigh. Going to be a long week.
This guy is an experienced DBA, so it's not a question of not knowing how to use computers. The class handouts have written instructions for every step of the labs, plus screenshots of the intermediate and final results, so he should be able to follow along. At this point we're all losing patience with him-- if we were in a classroom he would have never made it back from lunch, but since this is an online class it's too far to drive and hunt him down in person.
And, of course, there's no way for any of us to take the instructor aside privately and ask that they address the issue with him-- our only contact is via a microphone that the entire class hears or chat window that everyone gets to read.
Sigh. Going to be a long week.