Feedback for MOT - Improving the prerequisites for talks or webinars

Site Updates & Feedback
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Suggestions:

1 - Please include the prerequisites in the course registration web page itself.
MOT has started sending prerequisites by email after registration which is a bit late. It is also unnecessary email. Please send emails only if the prerequisites get updated on the course page. Moreover, if people don’t know the prerequisites, then they are unlikely to take the course even when they should. People need to be sure if they can take 2+ hours out of their calendar for a course.

2 - Give detailed info about the prerequisites.
Bad example - Basics of Javascript.
Good example - Basics of JS, clojures, event handling and the DOM, familiarity with unit testing in any object oriented language.

Consider this course for example link. It says that I need to know basics of JS which is a bit vague for a beginner to JS. I recently started learning JS from a “basic” course, but I haven’t completed the course. So, I don’t know if the knowledge I have currently is enough to attend the workshop.

I believe that addressing these concerns would help users to avoid registering when they don’t have the prerequisites.

1 Like
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Hey Raghu, thanks for taking the time to send us some feedback, something we greatly value.

  1. We always try and show the pre-reqs but sometimes the instructor doesn’t always have them ready, or want to make sure the attendees have the latest versions. With regard to the email, pre-reqs is just one purpose of the email.
    I do like the idea of sending specific emails for when pre-reqs change, I’ll give that some more thought.

  2. While on one hand I can see your stance here, granular can help, on the other hand granular can never stop. We feel that majority of our members are happy or understand the term basic. I don’t see us changing this.

Outside of pre-reqs we are exploring ways we can make it clearer if a a course/workshop is suitable for someone. Hopefully this will improve things.

What this space!

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@friendlytester -

  1. Can we request instructors to start classes only when they have listed the pre-requisites?

  2. I understand that we can end up making pre-requistes too granular (know strings, boolean, functions ?). But, we need to have a middle ground. Many job applications at least give you a high level overview of the pre-requisites in one tiny page. Why can’t courses do the same ? How many junior jobs only say that “Basic JS is needed” ? IMO, a one liner is too small, but an entire table of contents from a book is overkill. Can we have a middle ground ?

I wonder if MOT has some app/feature to suggest and vote for ideas. Maybe that could show how many users care about a feature. There are tools for this, but not sure how many are free and good.

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We could, but it can be really hard to get even an abstract of people. And as I mentioned, we need to give people enough notice of workshops, and in some cases the pre-reqs can change.

Maybe, but as I said, at the moment, it’s good enough for us and we have no plans to change it.

We can do this on The Club, but we currently have an active backlog and are focused on surviving this pandemic. I do suspect we will look for more community voting on topics and features in the future.