Hey it has a title finally.
Hey it has chapters…..finally. It’s mostly done.
I’ve talked about this class more than I should have. I just searched back through the blog and realized how much I had mentioned this class and how little I’ve gotten done.
Over the last month I’ve been pouring more time into this more advanced class to get it wrapped up – and I’m close. The first hurdle was “what do I cover” and the next has been “how do I blend it all together”. It has to blend together and has to build on the previous topic. It can’t have exercises that stop you from moving forward if you’re having a problem – in other words you can’t start chapter 3 unless you’re done chapter 2. That won’t happen – BUT you will see me referring back to chapter 2 from chapter 5. The knowledge base builds. If you had the pleasure of taking the intro class I’ll be pointing back to that quite a bit also.
There are 6 sections:
- Introduction
- Field Calculator and Expressions
- Processing Tools and Model Designer
- Editing
- Forms
- SQL
I’ve finished most of it and I need to review it and test it out on some people. So I’m looking at a Early August date to roll this out. It’s also going to be about 12 hours in length I think. It doesn’t cover everything I want – BUT – it’s enough for a more advanced offering. If I ever go back to “in person” training I may add the missing sections.
I will offer this class less than the intro class. So it will probably get offered once a quarter. Limited to 10 people. Maybe a few more due to the infrequent offerings. Don’t know on Price but I’m working on that and will have that when I schedule the class.
So where do we go from here? We have an intro class. We have an Advanced class….or Intermediate…..depending on what you want to call it. Well I started a third class because things work better in threes.
The final class will be an Enterprise scaled offering of sorts. It’s the “I really need to know if I can do some complicated work with this Open Source Stuff”. So I’m dragging PostGIS into the mix. I’m unsure what else I need to drag into it to be honest. I have an outline out and a few sections written.
WHY
Having now taught 30 people in the Intro class (and conferences and other things) I ask as many that will talk “So what are you doing here” and there are a wide range of answers. The common answer is “we need to get work done” and in some cases the work is simple and in some it’s complicated. They need more software than they have – most cases they X copies of commercial software. They need a database and better data management. So a third class – Anyway – I want to finish that up more quickly than I’ve been moving. Granted this last class will be software specific – BUT I’m going to preach Data Awareness and Data Cleanliness.
Watch for the announcement on Tools and Processing.
More news coming on Part 3 – Revenge of QGIS.
