"We completed our Linux Desktop Pilot course last week and are extremely pleased with the results. This course teaches the basics of the Linux desktop, with something extra for the power user, and the results shows that it does exactly that." says Alan McKinnon, Director of Training and Training Development. He adds "The version of Linux we use in this course is Ubuntu Linux. We chose Ubuntu for many reasons - ease of installation, a simple and intuitive graphical interface, stability, and a license that guarantees that the entire Ubuntu distribution will always be free."
McKinnon is leading, and most of the time doing, the actual development of new courses. He presents new courses himself to find bottlenecks and streamline the process before a course is released to the public by Linux Holdings. "Developing new training courses is a precision technology that includes training gradients, dependencies, and time factors", says McKinnon
The Desktop Course runs over a 3 day period. The aim of this pilot was to establish the quality and duration for the course. Students with a variety of computer experience attended and the pilot delivered very satisfactory results regarding the curriculum and training material.
McKinnon said "We are running a proper training development department backed up by a quality control department. Quality Control tests students at the end of their course, and also gets them going again if they get stuck along their Linux and open source training path. The Quality Control department is the watch dog of Linux Holdings, keeping a constant watch on training and trainer quality."
The 3 day Desktop Course is the first of a series of lower level Linux courses intended for the end user. We currently have in development a series of OpenOffice.org courses as well as a lower gradient Linux administration course that uses a graphical front end to teach the basics of Linux system administration.
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