Ziplines
View company profile →
Great experience, needs fine-tuning
While I thoroughly enjoyed Sam Barrows as a facilitator, I think the format of the course could use some adjusting. I included this information in one of my online course assignment responses, but here it is for a wider audience. The short of it: CERTIFICATION It is important to be clear that this course is NOT a certifying course; it is a prerequisite course that will help qualify folks for taking a third party certification exam. However, that doesn't mean the course will adequately prepare folks for a certification exam on its own -- it will only get folks started for thier external exam preparation. LIVE SESSIONS There are live sessions held once weekly. Having TWO live sessions a week would be more effective for the learning process. The first session would be one hour, using slides from the module to INTRODUCE the content to course takers -- making sure any new nomenclature and concepts are well defined and clearly understood. This session would include a brief Q&A session. This currently happens in the one live session, but the session is also treated like a review and assumes everyone has completed the module and is ready to dive into online, small-group, breakout work -- which isn't the majority of cases in the class. The current session set-up wastes time either by reviewing what is assumed already known from module studies -- or doing practice scenarios that folks aren't quite prepared for yet because they are making it to the live session, but haven't had time to familiarize themselves with the content for the week. This session could continue to take place on Mondays, as it does now. The second session would be two hours, like it is now, but would NOT include slides from the module as a slight review. Instead, there would be more time to really dig into the content led by participant inquiries and time to practice the work based on case studies that are used only for the online sessions (as it is now). There would be more time for completing breakout session assignments, and there would be more time for experienced project managers to share insights with inexperienced, up-and-coming PjMs. COURSE WORK Playbook Assignments Graders are slow rolling. It is important to get comments closer to when that content is fresh AND it is important to allow a window of time for revisions if necessary... and revisions need follow up comments. I re-submitted an assignment based on the grader's feedback, and that assignment wasn't looked at again. I'm still missing my "completion" dot after resubmission. Slack Assignments Slack is messy! I suggest two things to clean that mess up: 1) Have course-takers do their Slack assignments for each module on a Word doc first, and then post all lesson assignments for each module in ONE post inside that module's channel. This will keep things tidy for reviewers to see the work is done and other participants to give feedback. 2) Have an ONLINE SESSION channel for each module, too. The randomness of the slack posts for the online sessions inserted into the module assignments that are rolling in is messy and disjointed. LEARNING MANAGEMENT SYSTEM LOVE THIS FORMAT! However, there are a few speakers who could use some editing. One related everything back to his time in the military. This isn't a comfortable topic for everyone. I suggest keeping all examples relatable and relevant to industry strategies over military strategies. Another speaker was so oddly slow and her pauses were unnatural -- in places where there was no punctuation in the sentences. All of this feedback is intended to help the course move forward successfully. I enjoyed my time with our facilitator and with my cohort. I enjoyed the structure of the online coursework and the freedome to do the work as I could fit it in with all the other things happening in my world. I enjoyed our online facilitator and wish I could shadow her through one real project lifecycle! I would love to take this course again if given the opportunity by Ziplines (if my change-requests were made, and I was taking the course to review it again). I am excited to find my first job as an officially titled Project Manager! Thank you, Ziplines, for making this a possibility!