Recently I have received access to one of the uCertify Course – “70-516: MCPD – Accessing Data with C# .NET Framework 4”. Today I am going to write about my experience in using the course material from uCertify.
When you login to the site, you will get the list of courses subscribed to you. This site also providing free trail to familiarize different features of the site. Following screen shot shots the various options available for a user.
You can attend the Pre-Assessment test to understand your current potential on the topics. Chapters and Lessons cover the expected topics for the certification exam. Currently it is in a PDF document format, which opens up in the browser itself. I am not able find any videos or interactive learning content here. Moreover, the document covers the topics partially only. Structure of the document add more confusion than clarity on the topics. Few examples, where it lacks the structure is mentioned below.
Example 1:- Create Windows-based applications with Visual Studio discussed in the middle of entity framework course; course flow is not structured properly
Example 2: -Without mentioning the usage of EdmGen.exe command-line tool, the course talks about the various command line options available with this tool. There is no explanation about the MergeOptions or where to use it. Start explaining various options available as part of the enum.
Example 3: -Middle of merge option discussion, it talks about the System.Security.Cryptography namespace and the members without setting the objective. There is no use in listing lot of class names with small description in the same way as msdn reference. Not mentioned anything about the usage of the class or namespace, what is its relation with entity data model.
Example 4: -Second chapter tries to explain the history of SQL Server, which is in-appropriate.
Flash card gives short information, which will be helpful for quick references.
Quizzes, exercises and post assessments helps in evaluating the learning.
Overall, the different features supported by the site looks good. It will be better to have offline capabilities and interactive tutorials with Video/Audio support. Course content need a lot of rework and structuring. Same
