While I was at NI Week I took the training to become a Certified Professional Instructor (CPI). I just found out that I passed. My hope is to teach NI classes here at the University of Michigan and at the local NI training center. In a recent exchange at the LAVA forums I made the claim that we need more CPIs, and that claim was met with some skepticism. Do we need more CPIs? Why do we need them at all?
In my previous post I pointed out that NI is not in the business of teaching. They do have a training center and they do make a profit from teaching, but providing teachers for every class held in every country is obviously outside their core business model. More importantly, the teachers provided by NI have been non-certified, though that might be changing since they are now allowed to pursue certification. But the question remains: will NI teachers be held to the same standards as CPIs?
CPIs must have at least a CLD to teach NI classes. Will NI require the same from their own employees? I speculated previously that we will see many CLAD certifications from NI employees but that the number of CLDs and CLAs will be much lower. Will NI have enough CLD employees willing to pursue CPI certification, especially since trainers usually move on to other areas of the company after their first two years? It remains to be seen. My guess is that there will not be a large enough pool of NI CPIs to handle the teaching load. NI will have to either generate enough home-grown CPIs every two years to teach all the classes offered throughout the world, or they will have to continue their current double-standard policy of certified outsider/non-certified insider instructors. And even if NI could somehow provide a steady stream of new in-house CPIs, those CPIs would have at most two years of experience.
This is why we need more active, practicing CPIs. Teaching classes is one way that we, the LabVIEW community, can help promote and expand the use of LabVIEW. With more practicing CPIs the pool of qualified, experienced teachers will grow, students will be better served, and NI engineers will be able to focus their efforts on producing quality hardware and software. It's a win-win situation.
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4 comments:
NI application engineers that teach classes do go through an established training and evaluation process to prepare them for teaching classes. This is on par with what is asked of a CPI in terms of being able to present to and teach a group of people. You are correct that NI teachers are not required to have the CLD as we have limited internal certification in the past. You are also correct that most CPIs will have more real world experience than an NI applications engineer and therefore I would encourage experienced LV users who have interests in teaching to become a CPI.
To the question "will NI teachers be held to the same standards as CPIs?" I answer "I surely hope ! If not why would we bother taking the CPI test ?".
And I would add that until now I think that training held by Alliance Member's developers are much more valuable than training help by NI application engineer since many no (or small) experienced in building industrial system based on NI products.
The problem that I sees is that having a CPI it going to make people think they are competent teachers in the same way that having a CLD or CLA makes them think they know how to write good LV code.
The problem with the CPI is that to teach LV well you have to be a good teacher (a skill that I'm not sure you can instill in someone who doesn't have it) and you need to have LV experience (which a CLD doesn't come close to providing the necessary experience).
For what its worth I hold both a CPI and a CLA.
Well, mikeporter, I have to disagree with you a bit. I think the CLD is a good certification for teaching the Basic I and II and Intermediate I and II courses. You don't have to be an expert to teach a subject, you just have to be sufficiently ahead of your students and the CLD guarantees that, especially for the Basics classes.
I agree that the CPI training alone can't make you a good teacher. I think that the CPI training succeeds because most of the people who take it already have some teaching and/or speaking background. The group is self-selective. Anyone who wasn't comfortable with teaching and good at it wouldn't want to take the training in the first place.
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