[Info-vax] OpenVMS training - now in VSI's hands (?)

[dodecahedron99 at gmail.com]

I'm sure people have read that VSI have taken the reigns over for OpenVMS training but to give it extra visibility on Google searches etc I thought I'd post it here anyhow and give others a chance to put forward their comments / suggestions

http://vmssoftware.com/training/index.html

I've been looking at the courses and the pricing

Sadly, these are well out of my price range and my organisation will not pay for OpenVMS training but perhaps one day the tables may turn for me :-)

I know it's early days but I'm pleasantly surprised to see the training come under the VSI banner so quickly, this is great news

What's people's feedback on the training (keeping in mind that VSI had to start somewhere and I doubt this is their final incarnation of the training offering). It looks initially like a direct transfer over

Where do you want to see from OpenVMS training?

I'd like to see...

MOOC offerings
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I'd like to see some type of MOOC offering (have a look at Linux foundation training under the EDX banner  https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-linux-linuxfoundationx-lfs101x-2#.VQNl947Lfm4 )

People may not pay for a registered certificate and may not even complete all the modules (MOOCS have a high non-completion rate), what matters is that education of OpenVMS gets out there

Where I work, people look after OpenVMS applications and have no OpenVMS understanding! They flounder around, cannot even use the editor (they actually drag it all back to windows and edit files there and then transfer the data back). Large file manipulations are dragged to a unix system and awk'd there (yes, there is awk for OpenVMS). The worse part is then when they are asked to perform additional tasks / tweak the applications they whinge bitch and moan at how archaic OpenVMS is and how difficult it is to work with. Cry me a river about how unjustified this is but the place I work in has customers all over the world and are not a small outfit but even so, they will not invest in expensive OpenVMS training. This niche education need for cheap / free / near free, needs to be fulfilled as they are indirectly spokes people for OpenVMS to a broader community and currently are negative ones at that 

Online courses
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Online based content courses would be another want for me. You could offer them over set periods of time (say you purchase them with a 3 or 6 month offering with X number of users per period). These could have instructor feedback options added (I don't think to start with instructors are going to be swapped with student questions in mass)


Computer based training
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There used to be those online training courses with the workbooks many many years ago. What about resurrecting some of those? Make them available as standard on an OpenVMS install perhaps to a certain level in DCL/HELP/TRAINING and giving OpenVMS users a small taste of what further training modules they could purchase to have installed on their systems or on a mobile / tablet platform?

Training Marketplace
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Again I'll push my want and desire for an OpenVMS marketplace, not just for training but for all things OpenVMS (training, software development, systems migrations, systems integration etc)

Please don't shoot the messenger here and I know I know I know it's early days for OpenVMS under the VSI banner but to my mind the future of OpenVMS lies with the community and with VSI the custodians and framework provider, not the soul source of all things OpenVMS

Look at what others are doing. Amazon's cloud offerings, they have standard installs but also have a marketplace where others can package offerings and sell them ( I don't know if Amazon get a slice of the sale or not), I think this is a great concept and it allows those out there to create products to fulfill niches all under a recognized framework / banner. Use this idea as a central focus point for all things OpenVMS (much like openvms.org sort of used to do)

Epic games have also moved to this concept recently in developing their unreal engine (if you think they are small fry, think again! they dwarf the entire OpenVMS landscape by 100's of millions of $'s). Epic already had the gaming engine marketplace pretty well captured yet they saw the need to open up their gaming engine and charge a $19 / month fee for it's use, the net result was a 10 fold increase in the number of people using their engine! High cost to entry turns people / organisations away and shuns the entrepreneur and dabbler

Here's a quote by epic...

"There is no cost of getting in and because our business is built on a royalty-based model, we succeed when developers succeed with the Unreal Engine."

and one of the main drivers are:

"One of the drivers to the change? Many Unreal Engine 4 projects come from teams as small as one or two people where the upfront cost proves prohibitive. "They're students, they're new game developers, and they're people doing things in visualization and architecture," says Paul Meegan, president of Epic Games. "The more barriers we take away for more people to use the engine, the brighter the future is for Unreal and for our community of developers."

This to me is the future of OpenVMS. I'm really hoping for OpenVMS to be truly 'open' one day. My guess is HP just couldn't bring themselves to truly release the OpenVMS source code to open source, maybe one day, maybe one day...

Youtube seminars
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How about some youtube video training?
A picture represents 1000's words, so some unboxing type video's around perhaps getting OpenVMS installed on an emulator and wading through the hobbyist licence hurdles (It's still a bit of a gripe for me as to why OpenVMS cannot be as easy to obtain as a linux distro). I made a post on an IT forum once about OpenVMS and the hobbyist program. It generated a reasonable amount of excitement up until the part where people had to obtain the media, then it fell into the 'too hard' camp for most folk. It's a bit easier now (or was) when HP took it over and provided downloads directly of the media. 

Hobbyist program
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This is a form of training to me, having a system you can experiment on is invaluable and is a training environment of sorts

What are VSI going to do with the hobbyist program? I saw a post on the facebook page but didn't see anyone follow up the persons question


When I think training, I think education (from casual acquaintance all the way through to being mentored by the experts)


So what other 'training' would people like to see?