CompTIA CTT+ TK0-201 – Virtual Classroom Performance Based Exam – TK0-203 Part 2

9. Evaluation Criteria: Domain 5

Domain five is evaluating the training event. Now, five B, the second part of this really takes place on Form C. That is when you provide the long answers there to some of the questions that are posed to you as the instructor. But five A is definitely something that happens in class. So five A is evaluation of learner performance during and at the close of the instructions.

So make sure that you have your students share their screen from time to time. If they’re performing a technical task, you need to be able to see it. In an actual classroom, you would be walking behind their computer screens and checking that everybody knows what they’re doing. But in the virtual setting, you need them to share their screens, and then you can make comments on what they’re doing while they’re practicing. Oh, Mary, I noticed you did that very well. Thank you.

Or Jim, great job implementing this piece of instruction, et cetera. And then you’re specifically asked, in order to get four points to implement a final activity where you evaluate performance of a shared application. So this is an activity where they will have to perform it, and you will have to watch them do it and give some feedback. So make sure you’re familiar with the technology.

Make sure you know how to direct the students to share their screen, and you can do that seamlessly in order for you to pass this Virtual Trainer certification. Five B. Again, this is based on your long answers from Form C. We’ll talk about that in a little bit. But you’re going to be evaluating yourself and your course design, and it is important to be specific. So when you say that you did this or did not do that, make sure you give time markers in your video where you specifically highlighted that skill so that the evaluators know that you really did take a look and reflect on your performance.

10. Selecting Participants

When it comes to selecting your participants, you really have a lot of control over who you will use. It’s up to you. The CTT Plus official instructions say that you can use friends and colleagues. So whoever you feel that you’d like to use, you will need at least five people, and it’s good to really prepare them a little bit about what’s expected. Remember that they will all have to submit their signatures for that little waiver that says that they give you permission to record them during the class and also to submit the recording for the purposes of the video exam.

But yeah, they’re going to have some questions as to what’s going on. So just to be upfront, let them know that the recording is for the CTG Plus examination and that you have to give a sample instruction for 20 minutes. Make sure that you lock everybody up at least for an hour so that you can do a dry run and then the actual recording. If there’s a little bit of prep work, you might want to give yourself some extra time so that you’re not inconveniencing everybody, and likely everybody will want to know, well, what do I have to do during the class?

Depending on the nature of what you’re teaching, usually, probably they just come with a blank slate, ready to participate in some training. But if you’re teaching a very technical topic, you do of course, want to include people that will at least have a basic understanding of the industry that your topic is related to. So if it’s completely over the heads of one of your participants, well, it’s going to be hard to show learner engagement and that you’ve taken in the needs of the students, et cetera.

So make sure that you choose the appropriate people. And then, of course, it’s okay to stage some of the questions so that you can show that you’re interacting with the audience. And so for those who are willing to contribute in that way, you can plan that ahead of time. But again, you have some flexibility with this. So maybe sure you feel comfortable and the people that you are inviting to be in your video submission.

11. Tips For a Successful Recording

Let’s talk about some of these recording tips that are provided by CompTIA. Again, this isn’t a test about your ability to do web streaming, but you do want to make sure you’re providing a quality video that the evaluators are not distracted in any way by a lack of professionalism. So, number one, stabilize your webcam. This may not be a problem if you’re using a laptop. If you’re using an external device, just make sure that it doesn’t move around or it doesn’t kind of get wobbly if you nudge the desk, et cetera.

If you use a whiteboard application as part of your virtual classroom software, be sure to write legibly so that everybody can see what you’re writing. Use only one camera. So no fancy streaming work here. Just one camera pointed at your face is all that is required. And you probably know as well as most do that the audio coming through your PC or from some webcams cannot be the best quality. So if you’ve noticed that the audio is not clear, you might use an external mic if you have one, a lapel mic is great, or if you have some sort of condenser.

Again, no need to go out and buy new materials, but just check that the audio is coming through clear and limit distracting noises, so make sure that nothing’s too loud in your room, that the fan isn’t making noise, that nobody’s mowing the yard outside your window, there are no dogs barking or doors closing. All of this can be a little distracting, so find a time and location that is going to be quiet and make sure that your software is recording, so you wouldn’t want to get halfway through your performance and realize you hadn’t hit the click button, you hadn’t clicked the record button, and practice that a couple of times.

And just make sure you’re getting the output that you want, that you can hear, and that you can see everything that you need to for your recording and enhance your lighting. That is big for web streaming, particularly if you don’t have a lot of good lighting in the room that you’re using. You can get a very simple ring light from Amazon for less than $20, and it makes substantial difference to the quality of your video. So you’ve make sure that you position yourself so that you’re getting the best quality possible on your video.

12. Completing the Necessary Forms

All right, let’s briefly review again the forms document and again forms A-B-C and D. We’re going to talk a little bit more about form C in the next video. But Form A is just your profile where you give all of your information. Again. There is this CompTIA career ID number. If you’ve taken a CompTIA exam before, you will already have one of these. And of course, at this point, you’ve already taken the CompTIA TKO 201. So you will have been given CompTIA career ID number. Then also you are going to be submitting a photocopy of your CompTIA TKO one, and you’ll have to confirm that you passed that first. Following that is witnesses who states that you are the trainee in the recording. So they perhaps can audit this.

So obviously you’re not going to do anything fraudulent here, but you do have to provide some witnesses to that. There’s a release form for all of your participants, and you’re going to have to email it to them. And you’re going to have to give some information there that you have received back their email consent form to use their video in your submission.

Moving on, we get to form C, go to the next video for this one. So I’m just going to skip past it and move down to Form D, which is payment. And of course, you’ll submit your payment information. And then also here’s the information on how to upload which we’ll go over. But just at the beginning, make sure that you’re recording in the right file format before you get too far into this process.

13. Form C: Instructor Evaluation

The great thing about Form C as part of your CTT Plus exam is that you have all the time you need to get it right. Unlike the computer based exam, when you are under a time restraint, and obviously the performance based video exam, when you’ve got the camera on you, form C, you get to take what time you need. You can double check the requirements and you can go back and do a couple of drafts to get it right. So again, all of the questions here are particularly focused on subdomain one A and one B. That is domain one because it has to do with planning prior to the course, and also domain five, evaluating the course post course. So you’re going to give some answers to this.

You can go to the subdomain one A requirement in the CompTIA. org document and make sure that in the answer that you provide, you’ve done exactly what it says in that document and there’s no need to lose any points here. It is, of course, a reminder that you are going to have to give answers that correspond to the video you’re submitting. So, for example, you’ll see a note on this one. Your response to this question must match what scoring judges observe on the recording. So you can’t say that you planned something and then not show evidence of it in the recording.

Same with evaluation. You can’t say you did something and then not show it in the recording. It does have to be a sort of real life situation here. And then, of course, as I said, the second part is evaluating the training event and repeatedly. CompTIA does require that you give specific references to the recording. So my suggestion is to put timestamps as to when you perform a certain skill or instructor behavior so that the evaluators can correspond to long answers to the video itself. Bye.

14. Training Video Quality Control

Now, in the how to prepare for the TKO 203 document from CompTIA, there is this nice list of questions that you can ask yourself for quality control. Now, when we think of quality control, we often think of something that is done after you’ve created an initial draft to make sure that there is a standard. However, I wouldn’t suggest that you do it, do it in that order.

After you’ve gone through the preparation and the logistics of getting all your friends and colleagues together to record an event, you don’t want to notice that you’ve missed out on some quality control issue until after you’ve done all that work and have to do it again, right? So my suggestion is that you read over these items as you’re preparing. Make sure you watch all the videos in this section that you’ve read over these quality control items and read all the literature from CompTIA so that you don’t have to do things twice.

However, that being said, if after you’ve done a recording, you find that it is clearly not going to fly, that you are not going to get a passing score because you just know you have not touched on the items like you should have. Well, then you don’t want to waste the money submitting something that you know is not going to pass. So if that is the case, you have to do a little bit of cost benefit analysis and risk assessment and determine whether you’re going to call all of your friends again and rerecord the video. So that’s going to be up to you.

Of course, CompTIA here suggests maybe get somebody else here at the bottom, you’ll notice this suggestion, maybe get somebody else to view the recording and assess it, create a backup, make sure you don’t lose it. But again, my hope is that you will really put the preparation in, look at all these resources, plan very carefully and only have to do the recording once it’s.

15. Submitting to CompTIA

And just because I want this to be as seamless as possible for you to upload your video submission, I thought we could just go over the submittal instructions and what it looks and feels like. I don’t want you to be overwhelmed by the technicalities of uploading your video. So this information right here is taken again from the submittal instructions from CompTIA. org that you downloaded. It’s on that same file under form D. And as you can see, you have two options to submit your files the documents, the written documents and also the video file. You can send it in by mail if that’s your style, or you can do an online upload, which I’m guessing most of you will choose to do at CTT submission. com.

So if you go to CTT submission. com it will look like this. And when you do this, make sure that you are ready and prepared with the information from your TKO 201. You will have to put in some information that you received on the printout for successful completion of that course. You also are going to need your CompTIA ID number and some personal information. You’ll set up an account, you’ll perform form an email validation and then you will be prompted to submit all your videos on this site. So exciting. Once you get that done, you’re just waiting for a response from the evaluators ready to become a certified technical trainer?

16. Review – TK0-203

All right, let’s go ahead and do our review of Section Eight, everything you need to know to submit for the Tk 203. As I said, this requires a significant amount of planning and logistics to get this video put together. And I strongly suggest that you watch these videos thoroughly, that you review the submission forms from CompTIA, and that you also reviewed the instructions on how to submit for the TKO 203 that are provided on CompTIA. org. So by way of review, we talked about how you can get to those documents and what they look like. We also talked about how you can weave in all of the evaluation criteria, that is, the twelve sub domains of understanding, how you can weave them into your performance and give evidence that you have acquired that knowledge and those skills when you are performing.

We also talked about how to give evidence of those domains of understanding on Form C, which is the Instructor evaluation form, where you give some long answers to the questions. And we talked about some technical quality control things for your recording itself, how to make sure that you get the best quality recording in terms of your sound and lighting.

And particularly for the TKO 203. It is important that you really understand how to use the virtual software for your classroom, understand the features, make sure that you can use them thoroughly, and to control tribute to learners, and also make sure that you can go seamlessly between instructional media when you’re presenting through the virtual software. So that’s it for the TKO 203. I wish you all the best, and I’m going to see you for some closing remarks before you get ready to submit and take your test in Section Nine. I’ll see you there.