Introduction

When computer science was a new science, all computer engineers were self-taught since there was no official education available. Later, most of the commercial software and hardware vendors - including Microsoft, Cisco and Novell - came up with semi-official certification courses, in order to train people especially in their own technologies.

The problem is that while computer science can no longer be considered new it is still a fast developing industry. New technologies are invented every single day - some become popular - some do not. But the fact that the best engineers mastering the latest bleeding edge technology will always be self-taught, since the official education are always several years behind technology wise.

Linux is based on Unix and Unix has been around for more than 25 years now (in the form of commercial operating systems - SUN's Solaris, HP's HP/UX, IBM's etc.). Still, Linux as an Open Source community developed operating system, very few companies have shown commercial interest for Linux until a few years ago. With commercial interest comes the offering of vendor specific certifications and the demand for qualified engineers.

The problem with the vendor specific certifications is that they aim at making specialists in a specific products with the purpose of marketing that product - exactly as Microsoft, Novell or Cisco is doing with their certifications. GNU/Linux however is different. It consists of a core (kernel) and a suite of applications (the GNU part) that is generally the same and any engineer that has solid knowledge of these parts will be able to administrate any flavor of GNU/Linux. This is why, we at Netcom Partner believe that vendor independence is a must. We aim to educate specialists in GNU/Linux not specialists that only understand a certain vendor-specific version of Linux. The result is true specialists - technically qualified engineers with a solid understanding of the operating systems - engineers that can adapt to whatever challenges they are being faced with.

In short, we are not not creating Redhat specialists, Mandrake specialists, S.u.S.E. specialists or Debian specialists - we are creating Linux expert.

Course Material

While some Linux education uses material provided by vendors of commercial Linux distributions (Redhat, for example) it is our belief that one of the biggest benefits of Linux is vendor independence. We have therefor decided to develop our own teaching materials in order to ensure that the knowledge we provide is truly vendor independent and can be used by our students no matter what Linux distribution they may come across. Using distribution specific material and/or certifications does not encourage development of skills but rather limit the skills and proficiency gained.

Our material is being developed by teachers themselves which ensures that the teachers are current on the subject that they are teaching. The material development is supervised by our chief technical officer that have more than 6 years of experience in running and planning Unix related seminars throughout Europe.

Physically, the course material will consist of three parts. The teacher will use slides to explain principles and show examples. These slides will be provided to the students as handouts for later reference. Together with the slides, each student will be provided with a hard-copy of compendium covering the topics of each module together with relevant exercises. After having completed all modules necessary for certification, these compendia together will form a collection of reference information that the students can use in their future job functions. Last, the software used through the course will be made available for the students on CD-ROM's, so that they can immediately continue their quest for experience once they return to their job functions.

Teaching Style

Teaching style differs greatly from country to country. Our Linux courses are based on modern European teaching principles. We believe that people are fundamentally bad at memorizing things and we prefer to provide our students with a fundamental understanding of topics instead of a long list of ready knowledge (which may not be ready after a while). By teaching our students the fundamental working of various topics and by providing them with knowledge of where to find required information, we believe that we help the students become self-sufficient. No matter how many modules we create and no matter how long they would be, we could never provide the knowledge that experience will provide, but by focusing on making our students self-sufficient, we provide them with a solid foundation for gaining their own experience and be able at handle any job as as Linux systems administrator or network planner.

The individual modules of the training will run over two days. Each day is divided into 4 blocks. Each block will contain a mixture of class-room teaching (with computer off!) and individual supervised exercises. We do not believe in class-room step-by-step exercises. They are boring and they don't provide understanding. We believe the best way to gain true understanding is by doing problem solving, so our exercises are all designed to provide just that - problems for the students to solve (of course with the assistance of the class-room teacher).

In short, our teaching style will follow this pattern:

  • Principles explained

    This will in most cases be part of class-room session, with monitors off (no classroom's step-by-step examples!). Focus will be put on explaining principles and to obtain and understand available documentation.

  • Problem Presented

    The students will be presented with a problem in the form of a hands-on exercise. The exercises will be designed to be solvable using the principles and documentation provided during the classroom session.

In order to increase the quality of the modules for each student, we run our courses with very small classes. There will be a maximum of 12 students in each class and each student will have full time access to a PC for exercises.

Road-map

The JustIT GNU/Linux Training consist of 10 modules divided into three different levels:

Course Certificate

After having attended the individual modules and after having successfully solved the required exercises for each module, each student will be provided with a course certificate that will provide documentation of the topics covered by the individual modules.

Upon the successful completion of all required modules, the students will be provided with a certification that together with the individual course certificates, will document exactly what topics had been covered during the training.

At this time of writing, no internationally recognized Linux examination exists. We are however working together with companies in the Americas and Europe in order to develop a recognized examination. These will be offered to students when they become finalized.