Tara

Nov 20, 2023

Experienced instructor, poor dashboard

A previous review here claimed that there was no interactivity or practice tests for this class. I want to confirm that this is NOT true! We have access to a 180-question mock exam, a few timed practice exams, 35 practice quizzes (one for each PMBOK section), and even the class presentations themselves have a 5-10 question "learning assessment" at the end of each section. My virtual class with Baodi Ngo was mostly lecture but slightly interactive, where the other students shared their background with the subject matter or their experience in applying to the PMI. My class was generally very open and welcoming so I was comfortable asking questions whenever I needed. INSTRUCTOR: My instructor was Baodi Ngo; he was very knowledgeable about the exam and obviously had a wealth of experience to share that helped make the lessons come alive. He would solicit feedback regularly to make sure that his pace was good or his teaching style was helpful. When I gave feedback, he made a concerted effort to change his style to accommodate. For example, his stories would occasionally ramble, but once he got feedback about how to make it more concise, he implemented the feedback literally on the next slide and for the rest of the class. Having completed the whole class, I can now compare each day and I can say that the first class might have been paced too slow for the amount of content we had to cover in the last class. But all the content was covered and he was open to staying a bit later on the last day to answer any questions. CONTENT: The in-class slides were sometimes unclear about which vocabulary was related to agile vs predictive. For example, the slide would say "hybrid", but some words were clear indicators of agile environments while others were indicators of predictive. This was pretty annoying, especially when the exam is so specific about knowing the right word to use for the right environment. Ultimately, not a dealbreaker because the instructor would clarify in his lecture what we should take note of, but I would love it if it were explicitly stated on the slide itself. (Example of GOOD slides: 476-481 about Benefits. Example of BAD slide: 59 about Change Management) ONLINE DASHBOARD: While it has a wealth of information and resources, the UI looks very dated. This isn't just a complaint about aesthetics: the dashboard was genuinely difficult to navigate because of this poor design. For example, over the course of 4 days, no one in the class was able to find the pdf for the answers to the in-class "Learning Assessments". Our instructor finally had to e-mail the answers to us. Not sure if it was missing or we just couldn't navigate the UI successfully. More importantly, the dashboard would have broken links, like to the timed practice exams. (We had to reach out to customer support to fix them). I removed a star specifically because of the poor dashboard experience.