inFOCUS BEDFORDSHIRE KEVIN LARGE RUNS REMOTE TRAINING
Our focus is on two IT trainers, Kevin Large in England and Doug Warden in Canada. It is striking that both became teachers having taken courses while they were working in industry, and were then recruited by their respective training providers.
SOLUTIONS LTD AND LECTURES PART-TIME IN FURTHER AND HIGHER EDUCATION
As well as running his own IT training and consultancy business, Kevin teaches part-time at North Hertfordshire College, the University
of Hertfordshire and The Open University. He works six days a week, averaging 45 hours a week. This comprises 12 hours face-to-face teaching and
15 hours remote teaching via video conferencing, while the rest is preparation, assessment and administration. Previously Kevin worked in the electronics and computer networking industry. He came to teaching after taking an evening class at a further education college, which then asked if he was interested in
teaching. Both Kevin and Doug are Cisco Certified Academic Instructors (CCAI). Kevin has a number of technical certificates and a Certificate in Education. Professional updating is ongoing as he is taking commercial certification exams. As a Cisco networking instructor and instructor trainer he has links with the Cisco Networking Academy. Like Doug, Kevin also networks via his
role as a WorldSkills UK training manager for the IT Network Systems Support competitions. Kevin teaches a robotics, networking and Linux module at the OU. He also teaches advanced networking modules part-time at North
Hertfordshire College and at the University of Hertfordshire. Kevin adapts his teaching style depending on the course’s technical depth, preferring to stretch those at the highest levels with complex tasks, encouraging them to find solutions. Kevin recently delivered Cisco instructor training via Facebook Live to 1,131 students based all over the world.
CANADA ALBERTA
DOUG WARDEN TEACHES INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATIONS TECHNOLOGIES AT THE
SOUTHERN ALBERTA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY (SAIT)
Doug teaches 21 hours a week, about half of that in lab-based instruction, at SAIT’s School of Information and Communications Technologies.
Administration and preparation take up the rest of his week. He has taught at SAIT for 16 years, having previously been a Microsoft Certified Trainer with international IT training company New Horizons. His route into teaching has
parallels with Kevin’s. While working for a manufacturing company, Doug took a Microsoft certification course. At the end of it, Microsoft asked if he would like a job as a trainer. Doug has a Master’s degree in computer science, although his undergraduate degree is in zoology. Like Kevin he is a Cisco Certified Academic Instructor (CCAI). He teaches a two-year diploma at SAIT.
Both Doug and Kevin are constantly updating their knowledge and skills to keep pace with changes in the IT industry. SAIT has a professional development fund which helps cover the cost of conferences and courses. The institute also runs regular courses on different teaching techniques. Doug prefers a lecture-style approach to signpost students to the huge amounts of information they need to absorb. He tends to find flipped learning approaches too slow for covering the amount of material in the course. However, he has had success in gamifying some of the course to create learning challenges. He mainly delivers assessment online, but uses peer evaluation and self-tests too. Doug is the WorldSkills Canada Expert for IT Network Administration.
REMOTE TRAINING SOLUTIONS LTD is a small independent training provider near Luton. It offers Cisco training courses and Cisco instructor training courses.
ENGLAND
THE SOUTHERN ALBERTA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY (SAIT) is based in Calgary and is Canada’s equivalent of a general further education college. There are more than 20,000 full and part-time students on a wide range of vocational courses.
8 ISSUE 34 • WINTER 2018 inTUITION
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