LRCC ITN260 Review

Updated 8/5/2024

LRCC ITN260 Network Security Basics Review

This blog post provides a review of my experience in the ITN260 Network Security class at Laurel Ridge Community College during the summer of 2024. The course, taught by Dr. James Allen, has had a mix of pros and cons. On the positive side, the assignments are self-paced, the zyBooks material is user-friendly, and Dr. Allen is knowledgeable and personable in live lectures. However, the class has been marred by scheduling errors, poor communication, and mistakes in the midterm exam content. Despite these issues, the class has improved over time, with recent meetings running smoothly. While Dr. Allen has considerable expertise, his course management and communication have significant drawbacks. For me these problems are a big enough turn-off that I want to avoid his classes in the future. Others may find the problems tolerable, or overcome-able, due to Dr. Allen's experience and expertise in the field.

This summer, 2024, I am currently enrolled at Laurel Ridge Community College's ITN260 Network Security Class. Events in the first 2 weeks of class had me wanting to write a poor review. I'm re-writing it as a tepid review of the professor - Dr. James Allen - as of the above posted updated date.

Class instruction is done weekly on Mondays from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. via Zoom.

In short here are the pros and cons of my class experience so far:

Pros:

• Assignments are self-paced. They do have a due date, but we can proceed ahead of schedule as much as we are able to.
• The zyBooks material is easy to use.
• The professor, in person via Zoom, is a likeable fellow and seems quite knowledgeable on the subject matter.
• Dr. Allen uses the internet proficiently to add supplemental material to class lectures.

Cons:

• Scheduling Errors: Incorrectly scheduled Zoom meetings, leading to missed classes and unfair grades. Don't expect grading mistakes to be corrected with any type of urgency. He did not correct my attendance grade until the last day of class (I guess it's better than not correcting it at all, but it just seems like bad management to wait that long).

• Poor Communication: Slow response times, or no responses to emails, exacerbating confusion and frustration.
• Midterm Mistakes: Inclusion of questions from chapters not yet covered, demonstrating a lack of attention to course structure.
• Points assigned to completion objectives in a chapter of the book that does NOT exist (Chapter 20). At the end of class he changed it to a Chapter of LABS that were provided at the end of the book

• He appears to have difficulty navigating and controlling Canvas and the eBook for the class (not able to operate the grading system effectively nor assign dates to assignments properly). He's also not as proficient at operating Zoom as other instructors I've had.

• Despite the ease of use of ZyBooks, it is filled with errors. Some remedial, some significant. Overall I found the errors to be annoying. The errors I did find made me question the overall competency of the material. I caught errors that were somewhat obvious. Because of the nature of the subject matter, to which I am not an expert or adept at, I assume there are more. Errors I found were incorrect links to web pages, questions to material not covered. Questions to material that had yet to be covered. Mixing/ conflating vocabulary/ vernacular terms. 

I'm not going to go into too much detail (as I did in the original version of this blog post) but, as mentioned in the bullets, there was a scheduling snafu with the Zoom meetings. They were incorrectly scheduled for 12 p.m. Mondays instead of 7 - 9 p.m.  Mondays on the second week (despite the college course catalog AND the Professor's syllabus listing the correct dates and times). The professor has since 'owned it' as a 'mistake' and corrected it so that Zoom meetings are being held at the proper time. Personally, I would have claimed it was done on purpose if I were him. The alternative, which apparently is reality, to me implies incompetence (how does a professor NOT know when his class is to be held?).

I've reviewed my blog post with Google's Gemini. It believes my chief complaint with the professor is his pedagogical, or course management, performance; which I believe is accurate. For me it was enough of a turn-off to the learning experience that I would still avoid Professor Allen despite his experience in the field. Someone else may feel this is not a significant hurdle, or may value his experience over whatever administrative issues he may have. Go for it if that's you.

At the bottom of this Post is an example of one of the midterm exam questions from a chapter of the book we had not covered yet. There were many like that. 

The final exam was a mind numbing 200 questions long. It was open book. It took me over 4 hours to complete. I felt the book had inadequately prepared me for many of the questions on the exam. Many of the questions I ended up answering only after eliminating as many wrong answers as I could. There were many questions where you could not find a direct, correlatingly correct answer in the textbook and the best you could do was select the correct (hopefully) answer after eliminating incorrect ones. It was tedious work. Many of the questions required far more comprehensive understanding of topics that were only briefly touched on in the textbook. I got a B on the exam (I got a B on the midterm too). Without knowing how the exam questions are selected/ created it's hard to ascribe the problems with the exam to the professor, or to the course material/ content.

I apologize for the differences in perspective throughout the blog. I originally wrote it in the 2nd/ 3rd week of class and updated it over time. At the end of class I tried to come back and tidy it up and summarize my experience, while leaving some of my original thoughts in place.