This has been a busy week and an exhausting week, introducing eleven people to Maximo, most of whom had spent little more than a month with their companies. We were entertaining six persons from two IBM Business Partners, competitors of ours, but hopefully a start of some collaboration between us. Each day I came close to achieving my 10k steps, nearly all of this made walking up and down the classroom. On Tuesday morning I croaked into action and gave a bit of dry British humour as I apologised for going to a karaoke bar the night before; as if a 65-year-old would have done this, but some did believe me, and at the end of the week I confessed it was all a hoax.

The videos we were showing were not entirely appropriate for complete beginners and were mixed in quality, but I could pause them frequently and explain the concepts and provide examples so that together the audience could understand what was being discussed. If they had just been looking at the videos with no recourse to a teacher or mentor, they would have found the courses exceedingly difficult. What I did learn from the audience watching some of my own videos is that they are watchable by beginners because they each have a contained scope. The consensus was that they could be watched and learnt from if you had a few months experience, the access to the transcripts, slides, and quizzes helps this learning journey.

What is missing is a one-week classroom-based course set at the right pace to allow concepts to fall into place. This would start with a Maximo overview starting with the overview of the whole Maximo suite, and lab work to get the attendees used to navigating Maximo, making, and saving queries, etc. The scope we covered was the right set of Maximo modules and there should be a 50/50 split between videos, slides and discussion, and lab activities where the student is hands-on with Maximo, our split was more 60/40. Each introduction to a module would give an overview and spell out what would be covered and what would be left out. Care should be taken not to overload the student with too many terms, and when introducing a term, it needed to be explained.

I now have a good idea of the shape for a first course. What I have been producing to date based around the existing videos and podcast is exactly what I need for the second and subsequent courses, so I can continue with building up additional layers for this, the quizzes and glossary.

This new Introduction course apart from the overviews would be much more showing how to do something in Maximo rather than explaining what Maximo can do, this is a different type of video and going forward I need to work on the workflow for this.

When going to the office in Breda, NL, there is always a danger that I will pick up something new to do, or a reminder of something which I had previously said I would work on, and last week was no exception. I need to start writing the podcast episodes for a new set of topics, these were in the plan to be done in the first half of the year. I’ve written three sets to date with a total of forty episodes, this is reversing the order of the 4th and 5th set, so no big deal.

I also learnt last week that with my updated CV we managed to secure a new client in the Antwerp area of Belgium with some initial meetings to be scheduled next week which can be done remotely. I am now wondering how many videos I will achieve this year.

In the Summer of 2020, I created a set of quizzes on nine consecutive weeks. I have a menu item for this, and these posts still get regular views. I had a post for the question and another post for the question and answers, the posts with the questions and answers are more popular. I will look to convert them to the new style of quiz that uses the flash cards, but this has me thinking should I create a new post, or adapt the existing post with the questions and answers? The title will not be the same, but I could retain the same URLs. I think I’ll ask a question to the community to see whether it is better to modify the existing posts to the new style, or just create new posts and retire the old ones. As it happens these quizzes are the subject areas for the new set of podcast episodes, so as I write the transcript, I’ll adapt the associated quiz.

At the weekend I did manage to restart the Time Capsule backup to the new NAS drive. I am reasonably confident it continued from the point where it had been interrupted, but I don’t know for certain. A full encrypted backup of over 500GB I think took more than 48 hours, and so I’m not going to restart it unless the doubt keeps nagging away at me. Part of the length of time it has taken will be down to writing the same files to two disks, I think it is called Mirroring, the NAS drive does this automatically. I did hear back from my retailer to say that in the UK, Western Digital manufacturer warranty starts from the point of sale and they will take up my case with them. They even provided me a link to the Western Digital website, so I should have 2 years warranty, so perhaps they were trying to pull a fast one.

I should test out that I can recover a backed-up file from the NAS drive. I ought to also create an area of the disk where I copy all the video files, and then be brave and delete them from my laptop’s hard disk to save space.

What objectives for next week, week 58.

• I must finish the editing of the 23rd YouTube video and get it published with the transcripts.
• I still have an issue with the lazyload of images on the new quiz. I have a section which explains what the coloured rosettes mean, so I could swap these seven images for a single image, and this might correct the issue.
• The glossary links are no longer working after disabling the Glossary plugin and reenabling, so I need to sort this out.
• Start the conversion of the remaining quizzes to the new flashcard format so that I can continue writing new quizzes using the new format.
• As I can see me struggling to find time to create new videos, I think I’ll record and publish the next 5 podcast episodes. I’m thinking I should continue to publish the remaining 18 over the next few weeks, those where I have already prepared the text.