MVA Site Enhancements: January

re: MVA Site Enhancements: January

Mikhail — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 19:14:54 GMT

MVA is awesome! Way to go all you guys for the effort you put into making it great.

Regarding a previous post needing exams for all courses, I think some students will find it discouraging especially for the JumpStart series. But I agree, we should have a quick 5 "easy" questions exam at the end of the course so that it brings more validity to the completion certificate.

Anyway new suggestions for you guys:

1. More Courses You Might Like: Great feature already: Instead of a general list of courses, maybe it could show not completed courses related to the category of the course we are viewing instead. If the list doesn't reach 10, then it could also show courses related to other categories chosen by the user (in the "My Preferences" section of edit profile). If the list still doesn't reach 10, :-) then it could show upcoming live events. If it still doesn't... ;-)

2. Show the total time for videos (and if possible the time to read the materials) in the course summary . This will help with evaluating what course to tackle next. Plus its also good for newbies trying to catch up.

3. List the certifications that these courses could help with like it was done with "Upgrading Skills to Windows Server 2012 Jump Start" although that one referenced a specific exam. Anyway, this way, once the feature is a little mature you could then give search ability against the certifications as well.

Either way, any suggestions you implement only help make MVA even more aweomsertastic!

re: MVA Site Enhancements: January

Ricky Day — Sat, 30 Mar 2013 11:11:20 GMT

Again like to thank you for a great resource MVA team.

Plain to see from the top 10 that the cheating is still rife, which is a real shame!

Says a lot about the individuals I guess, they don't know as much as they thought they did hence the need to cheat, shame a real shame, and hope your can curb this one day MVA team.

re: MVA Site Enhancements: January

MARCOS MARINS — Sun, 10 Feb 2013 15:10:39 GMT

GOSTEI MUITO DESSA IDÉIA... TENHO UM PROJETO PARECIDO E ACHO QUE PODE COMPLICAR PRA MIM SE ACASO DÊ CERTO QUANDO IMPLANTADO AQUI NA MINHA REGIÃO. DESDE JÁ PEÇO A MICROSOFT QUE ME AJUDE, QUE SEJA PARCEIRA E SE POSSÍVEL ATÉ COLABORE PARA QUE JUNTO POSSAMOS FAZER UM TRABALHO DE SUMA IMPORTÂNCIA PARA A SOCIEDADE LOCAL E, POR QUE NÃO, MUNDIAL. PARABENS AOS IDEALIZADORES DA ACADEMIA VIRTUAL DA MICROSOFT E PODEM SEMPRE CONTAR COMIGO.

re: MVA Site Enhancements: January

Stephan Ertel — Sun, 10 Feb 2013 08:22:11 GMT

Hi,

yes Ricky Day; mrpaulb, you´re right and i hate it, too... but also at my certification to MCITPea, there were also students, who just knew the answers, they never had as much score as me ;) but they got the same cert and cannot configure and explain simple things like DNS in AD!! And the GER no.2(MVA) did soooooo much courses, i´ll never do^^ but He was my Trainer to MCITP, he knows really much (&much languages^^)

And in Germany, business-people doesn´t know what it means to "KNOW" the systems.. And thats my problem for getting a job.. They don´t understand that i dont need 5 years business experience to onsite-support clients :D because i AM ServerPRO..

In german MVA, i am 25th of 24.000, REAL skills, so i will show them my 30 MVA Certs ,too :))

THANKS mva, rock on.

re: MVA Site Enhancements: January

Justin — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 09:06:27 GMT

I'd like to learn about Lync Server or Exchange Server, but I don't find any course in MVA. How do I find these courses in MVA?

Thanks & Regards,

Justin

re: MVA Site Enhancements: January

Michael Aldridge MVA Site Manager — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 16:09:04 GMT

Hi STL Shawn - thanks for your feedback. Sorry we are making it difficult for you. We are working to make our content more discoverable in several ways which I think will address your concerns over the next few months.

Love all the ideas and feedback everyone.

re: MVA Site Enhancements: January

STLShawn — Sun, 03 Feb 2013 16:52:28 GMT

Still missing tracks and learning paths.

For example, I want to learn about server 2008 or server 2012 to use with test plans. From a bing search, i go to a direct link:

www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/.../WindowsServer2012

This shows a learning path that includes the things in order of how you should study them.

But, there is no good way to this page from home or any link that i can find easily.

There may be some good stuff in here. Shame i can't find it.

re: MVA Site Enhancements: January

mrpaulb — Sat, 26 Jan 2013 18:53:58 GMT

Hi Ricky,

I can explain the following,

"I see at the moment that someone that was on the TOP 10 has made their profile non public so they disappear, I guess they don't realise that I have bookmarked quite a lot of peoples aliases, so simply clicking on a bookmark I can see certain people are suddenly in Spain."

The people disappearing and reappearing (me included) are changing their country to access content in other languages, and then changing back.

I don't think this is an issue, unless doing the same course twice or more times or if just clicking links to gain points. In Spanish in particular there are a number of different courses not available in English.

I don't speak Spanish, but I find the matching UK material on technet or msdn work through that, and then use web page translation for the tests.

Congrats on completing all the UK material, I know this was a lot of work.

Very impressed you admitted to jumping on the bandwagon, not many people in this world who would do that these days.

Kind regards

Paul

re: MVA Site Enhancements: January

mrpaulb — Sat, 26 Jan 2013 18:12:17 GMT

Hi Michael,

Thanks for the feedback, I'm doing courses in English and couple of other languages (mostly Spanish), the Spanish ones, because there is some great .net and VS development content not available in English, and also like Ricky I have completed all the courses in English.

I'm not doing courses that duplicate those in English, I am also completing these including the exams, I hope the setup will continue to allow this. (or have same courses for all languages which would be idea, I understand this would limit the content so is highly unlikely ).

Apart from removing points for duplicate courses, and request to only include completed course points for ranking purposes, there are a couple of other things that could be done to help, you probably already have these for consideration, but thought I would share my ideas anyway.

1). Make the points in each course only for exams and course completion, this will remove the possibility of just clicking links to gain points.

2). Provide each Top 10 profile a % figure to show how much of the points come from completed courses. (This as an alternative to only allowing completed course points for Top 10 ranking).

3) Make the completed course listing mandatory for Top 10, again this won't fix the Top 10 but would show those that are collecting points and not learning.

The Top 2 Students in the All Time in MVA seem to have more points than it is possible to gain even doing duplicate courses in all the languages (600,000+ and 300,000+ if I recall these correctly, numbers are now hidden from us.) I can work out the new No 3 in all Time all MVA has more than 27000 points because they have gained this many in one month !

Doesn't impact me but seems unfair for the All MVA forth place student who looks like they have legitimate points for the courses they have completed, also unfair for those Students in 11th and 12th in the World rankings.

Please also add exams for all courses, I have just completed the SQL for Oracle DBA course, great content and some questions would have been good to confirm how much I understand. I also joined the Win Phone 8 course live for two days, so was disappointed there were no questions to test (and reward) the time spent learning.

I did click on one course thinking by its name, it was different to the ones I had done in English to find the first Video was something I already did, therefore I won't do any more on this course. Can we have a remove course button on our dashboard, I'm happy to lose the points when doing this.

Last point, anybody can use web search to help with exams so there will always be a limit to how good the Top 10's are reflecting students ability and effort, this can't be helped, but at least if somebody gets to the Top 10 by doing this they would have learn't something along the way. Having said that, doing as much as possible to make the rankings legitimate I believe is well worthwhile for student motivation.

Kind regards

Paul

re: MVA Site Enhancements: January

Ricky Day — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 23:59:38 GMT

Some people are taking this bug to whole new levels.