MOOCROSOFT tosses seven proper tech courses online at edX Microsoft has clambered further aboard the massive online open courseware (MOOC) bandwagon by announcing seven software development courses to be hosted on the MIT-and-Harvard-governed edX education platform. Microsoft's been an edX partner for a while, but to date hasn't done much of the university-grade vocational courses …
Well, I have 3 "certifications" from edx and I can tell you nobody has heard of these. That being said, strangely, these appear just as envolved as any other ones. There is of course certain things that I expectedly don't see convered like Cisco, but all in all they should have some merit to them.
Also, it may be me missing sections of the site, but I have never seen a course you have to pay for. I'll have to look for these when I get back on there. At least Microsoft is bringing some attention to the site, because there really is "things" that are of value (I stick with the math and the C based programming areas, and they are helpful...If you don't use it, you lose it)
@MyBackDoor
I have a few Statement of Achievement & Verified certificates with both edX & Coursera, are they of any value to prospective empolyers? Don't know, did I gain knowledge and brush up on skills, very much so and enjoyed doing it. They can certainly challenge as much as any degree level course and are more in depth than many courses that are offered by many training companies IMHO, therefore must agree with you they should have some merit.
Another thing most of the CS courses to date I have done with edX/Coursera used open source software and Linux, the first Linux course had 100,000 people sign up before it started, Microsoft can ill afford, not to be involved, with that level of engagement going on
Yeh, I really haven't even bothered to work edX if the software wasn't free, of course I didn't know working with non-free was a option until now (still haven't been on there yet). At least half the courses I have signed up for offer a VM for the practical exercises, which when you consider it's free, shows a certain attention to preparations made that might not be made in costly classes (I've been in a few paid ones that were really just a exercise of fixing your learning materials and staying awake).
But right, the less time companies spend with sites like edX, the more they'll spend trying to figure out why they can't find anyone to do their job
> The jury's largely out on employer and headhunter attitudes to this kind of achievement.
Tell you what. Let's find out. As a deve/architect these days, I haven't done any Powershell and the gap in my knowledge is bugging me. I'll do the Powershell course and put it on my CV and see if it gets noticed. $90 should be an affordable tax write-off, especially when converted to proper Sterling monies.
Funny you mention that - I'm in systems architecture too and have the same gap. The few times I've sat down to do something with it, I've been extremely impressed with how cool it is. The problem is the high bar to get anything reusable done. Command line stuff is great - you don't need hundreds of utility functions in VBScript to parse text files, interpret command output, etc. The thing that I think really puts people off is the syntax. It's similar to DCL (OpenVMS command shell,) super-long commands that have a million shortcuts and ways to be abbreviated, with variables and control structures that seem to come from Java, C#, the UNIX shells, Perl and who knows what else. And of course, this gets more complicated when you start adding in vendors' custom PowerShell cmdlets to the standard mix.
Once you get enough practice it's really not that bad, but for a language aimed at administrators, there's a pretty steep learning curve to get beyond the basic command line stuff. One of the things you have to let go of is that the interpreter is basically doing everything for you and you're just gluing the results together...very different mindset from VBScript and the batch language.
It is good to see Microsoft trying to get admins to learn and use PowerShell though -- not that they haven't, but making the courses free is a huge step to ensuring adoption.
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