|
In the November 2004 issue of the SEGUS
Newsletter, Kathleen Guerra, E-Learning Manager of the
Education Division of SAS Institute, provided a brief
overview of their online Enterprise Guide Curriculum.
Happily, I was given the opportunity to try out a couple
of the self-paced training courses and would like to
share my experience with you.
The two courses I accessed were:
Programming Using SAS Enterprise Guide and Querying
Data Using SAS Enterprise Guide.
First, I would like to say that the online,
self-paced format of these courses was very useful to
me since it allowed me to access the training without
needing to schedule a large block of time all at once.
My day is usually filled with consulting questions and
various projects, but I was easily able to work through
the course material in small chunks, resuming the course
from the same spot I left off.
Both courses were well organized, with linear
Learning Paths. Each was intended to take about an hour
and a half to complete and included a Lesson Overview,
step-by-step exercises, Try-its (follow-up exercises
with a toggle to show the solution if you get stuck),
and a Lesson Summary, followed by a quiz. You can also
print off a certificate of completion after passing
a 10 question quiz at the end of the material. They
are browser based, with no special plug-ins or players
required. Only javascript and cookies need to be enabled.
The Lesson Topics are meant to be accessed
in order and many of the exercises build on each other.
To do the exercises, you open SAS Enterprise Guide and
size the window so it sits side by side with your browser
window. I found it helpful to set my resolution to 1280x1024
and keep the browser window narrow to keep the query
window from covering up the lesson text.
The courses covered the lesson topics well.
They are available for different versions of Enterprise
Guide. At the time I took the Programming course, the
most recent version available was for Enterprise Guide
version 2. Because I have Enterprise Guide version 3
on my system, not all the menu options matched, but
I was still able to work through the exercises. There
were 52 pages of content. Since that time Nancy Goodyear,
Manager of E-Learning Technologies at SAS for the self-paced
courses, has informed me that the course is now available
for Enterprise Guide 3 as well.
The Queries course was available to use
with version 3 and all the step-by-step directions worked
well. This course is an excellent value for anyone who
wants to perform SAS tasks using data from Microsoft
Excel or Access. The Queries course provides clear examples
and practice in simple queries and more complex ones
involving subsets, joins, and grouping and filtering.
There were 67 pages of content, no audio, but plenty
of clear graphics.
The self-paced courses are licensed for
30 days, so you can go back to the material again and
return to topics that you want a refresher on. There
are no course notes to download or way to ask questions
as with a live instructor, but there is a course summary
page and additional learning resources listed at the
end. The convenience and low cost of the self-paced
courses makes them a nice choice.
|
