This "school" is not a very good choice for people looking for a proper education.
first issue I am having is that; I went to school to this school because I wanted to get an education in this field from a college that knows what they are doing and teaches me only what I need to know from a technology college. I have researched other schools and triOS had good a reputation for other courses such as their networking courses and expected the web design to be the same. This is the second year triOS offered this course and the instructor has not been hired so I could determine their qualifications. I expected that triOS would hire more knowledgeable instructors with real life experience then just reading from a book. After a short while of school we all learned that the instructor’s knowledge of web design and development is fairly weak. He would teach by copying the contents of the textbook for the course we are taking onto the board and that would be our lesson, if we ever had a problem with some of the content he was teaching we were most of the time alone to find out an answer for ourselves. We have also found the computers we were using either could not run what we needed it to, or did not have what we needed it to. For example in the gaming class they were without Maya (the 3D animation program) for weeks and the teacher had to bring in his copy just so we could use it, because the school was taking so long to supply us with it. There have been many occasions when the software was not configured properly or we would have not proper security on the systems to do things. I under stand that computers are temperamental them selves but there is no excuse when it is a constant thing.
We have brought this issue to the school in monthly campus surveys from the school and brought the issue to many of the staff including the campus director. We also sent a letter (that I have enclosed with this letter) directly to the top, with all of our complaints at the time as well as signatures of all the students. Their response was not what we were looking for, it seemed like they were just avoiding our questions and showed no will to try and correct what we have been complaining about. One of their major responses was that they are giving us these textbooks to prepare us for certifications, we wont be ready for any certifications the way they are teaching. We are learning the basics from a book meant for a professional with 3-4 years of experience, it says that right in the book. The lessons and the tests are all based on this high level book and we are all just trying to grasp the basic concepts of the subject. We are also not sure that the surveys even get read. In this private college there are 7 students in the afternoon class, and more than 7 in the morning class, I am paying roughly $18, 000 for my course and there are more than 14 students in total. That totals out to at least $252, 000, that means as a class we are paying at least a quarter of a million dollars! Why can’t they afford to help us out, have better systems/software, or better teaching? I can’t help but feel that attending this school is ripping me off; I feel like I am paying for an extremely expensive baby sitter that I have to drive 30 minutes to and from every day. All I get is a 5-hour story time and a piece of paper at the end that says that I know exactly what was read to me in class. I don’t want a baby sitter I want a teacher and a school that will teach me what I came to learn.
One of the biggest problems I have with the course is that it is called Web Design/Development, I have not been taught any web design at all. The course did not teach us what we needed to know at all, we were supposed to be taught Adobe software and we were but the teacher did not teach it at all, he gave us tutorials and we sat down and read the book. The teacher has such a poor understanding of the concept that he was assigning ActionScript 2.0 questions in our ActionScript 3.0 class; there is a large difference between the two. In our SQL class not only did we learn 2005, when 2008 was available for quite some time, but all we did was copy queries from the text book, literally only copy and paste. I would have liked to learn how to build a data table and tie it to something at least, but now I have a bunch of useless knowledge on SQL. We were supposed to be taught HTML in a very short time, and we didn’t even make a web page in that class. The introduction to C# was the only good part of the course, the only problem was it was all desktop application programming, not web. Our ASP.NET class, we were supposed to go through and build a shopping cart web page, which was good in theory, but the teacher didn’t know how to do it for himself. So we were all struggling with trying to just get things to show up on a page because we have a textbook that requires 3-4 years of experience with ASP.NET already and a teacher who doesn’t have any clue about the basics, just what is written in the book. I have never seen a single web site built by the teacher, even as we were building our we page he didn’t, how can we be taught what we need to know if he can’t even create a web page himself.
I was also told that I will get a job at the end of this course, when ever they ask why we are coming here we will answer, to get a job. They are so confident that we will all get jobs, in this course I was expecting to have professional help, knowledge, and facilities to build up a portfolio that I could be hired with. Without a portfolio how would we get hired? I don’t think that any employer will hire a web developer without seeing some of their work first, no different than any other design profession.
I don’t think it is fair at all to call your self a school and charge money for this, if this is what private colleges are really like, why do we have them? Whether they are here on OSAP or self funded or funded by work, it is a complete waste of money and time for everyone. I regret wasting so much time and money on this school, and extremely disappointed that they can get away with not even considering our concerns.
All around this is a complete disappointment, and none of us in the class think this is a positive experience.
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