Renegade Goes Rogue

I discovered this week that the VINGN Broadband project is offering a free online Digital Literacy Course.  The course follows an 8 week curriculum that covers computer basics, Internet usage and usage of core software like spreadsheets and word processors.  Now if you read the article I linked above there's no link to the sign up site.  You can find the sign up site right here.

Yours truly went rogue and signed up to take the course.  First warning, there's a good chance you might have to email the site administrator to finalize the sign up process.  Regardless, I encourage everyone who wants to learn more about computers to take this course.  It's free and even though it says 8 weeks you can take it at your own pace and probably finish much sooner.  The presentation of the material is done mostly though a series of videos so you won't be doing a whole lot of reading.  The reading is done when it's time to take the exams.  You can finish the course by getting an 80% or more on the three pre-tests, and 80% or more on the module exams (three of those too), or getting a combined score of 80% or more on a combination of the pre-tests and module exams.  Once you do that you get to take the Master Exam.  80% or more on that and you pass!

Overall I think there's enough information there to get you started understanding all this computer stuff.  I did find some of the information to be kind of narrow though.  For example, you can do charts on presentation software, word processors and spreadsheets but the system insists that spreadsheets is the only way to go for charts.  For a total beginner though, this course is decent.

What did I get?  Don't let this discourage you.  I only browsed the site for the basic feel and didn't view any of the videos.  I passed the three pre-tests in the span of about 10 minutes and finished the Master Exam today in about the same amount of time.  My grades are below.

Whatever you do though please don't judge your performance by what I've got.  I've been doing this sort of stuff for years and I'm actually formally educated in it.  So for me, this was ridiculously easy (although I'm sure I really applied myself I could have done a little bit better).  I actually had an ulterior motive for taking and finishing this course.  In the future more advanced training and certifications might be offered and I wanted to get the preliminaries out of the way as soon as possible.

***********Update February 14, 2013*************

Guess who got his certificate.