.: Analysis of Course
For this assessment project I have chosen my Information Technology 274 – Windows Active Directory (IT274) course. The IT274 course is a newer course that I added to our program last year after meetings with our Advisory Committee, which is a group of community leaders, business managers, and IT professionals. We use the Advisory Committee to give us insight into the needs of their workforce and what a student would need to know to be hired by their firms. Many of them had voiced a concern that their employees needed a better understanding of Active Directory, so our response was to develop a course for this purpose.
Since many of our Information Technology courses are mapped directly to industry standards-based certifications, like Cisco’s CCNA, CompTIA’s A+, and Microsoft’s seven MCP certifications, we developed the IT274 course based on Microsoft’s Active Directory Exam 70-294, which is a requirement for their Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE) certification. After examining the learning objectives of the 70-294 exam, we began our search for a text that would provide the knowledge content and the skills training needed for our students to be successful in this field and prepare them for this industry certification exam. The text we selected breaks the 70-294 exam objectives into 16 Lessons. Each Lesson is comprised of the objective’s content and 8-10 Skills lab exercises that are done to reinforce the content.
The IT274 course is a second-year course for those IT students that have already completed three prior Microsoft certification courses. This is a very structured, scaffold program, where each course’s content builds the plateau that the next course will build upon. Students taking this course must already possess a strong knowledge of networking, client operating systems, network operating systems and networking administration experience.
Active Directory has a very logical theory/design side as well as the physical construct/configuration/management side. Consequently I have designed this course to contain both a theory and a lab component, since the Microsoft 70-294 exam requires a solid understanding of both. The certification exam questions are usually in the form of very lengthy real-world case studies that flood the student with a sea of data about the circumstances. The student must be able to filter through the data, and using problem-solving skills, eliminate those elements that are not part of the problem until the student can identify possible solutions. This requires that higher order thinking skills, like problem solving, critical thinking and analysis, be integrated into this course.
.: Return to - Stage One: Project Proposal |
