I have attended the GCIH course at a conference with Ed and I can say it was amazing and very informative. I had no idea who is leading the SANS @home course but i Believe that the course material are the same as that of conference.

Hi Galaril,

I took the on demand course which was ran by Ed Skoduis and it was great.  Very informative and it was nice to have the lectures as MP3 files.  I loaded these onto my iPod and listened to them during my daily commute.

cheers
-Jack

All your questions will be answered @ www.sans.org

Thanks

CadillacGolfer,

Thanks for your confidence in Ed Skoudis.  I'm slated to take his GIAC Penetration Testing course this summer through the @Home program. When you took your first @Home course, what were your concerns/ fears?

My biggest fear is not being able to gauge what the other students are thinking/ feeling. I've been in classroom settings many times before and usually if I see another student uncertain about a topic I'll speak up and have the instructor go a little more in depth so that everybody can understand it.

My other biggest concern is the hands on part. How is this handled in the online classroom setting?

Thanks,
Koob
 

Hi Davekoob,

  Cool, I'll be taking the pen testing class as well, see you then :-)

  As far as being able to gauge what the other students are thinking/feeling, it depends.  @home now uses a virtual classroom software program that will display the presentations and stream the audio.  It also has a chat feature which the students use to ask questions.  So if the students are willing to "speak up" in the chat, then you'll get a sense of what they're thinking/feeling, otherwise you obviously can't see the expressions on the students faces.  The virtual classroom is a lot better than when I first took the incident handling course - back then questions to instructor were via AOL instant messenger - which Ed was good about reading the questions aloud, but you didn't see the question yoruself.

The hands on part - again, it depends - on how they set the pen testing course up.  When I took the incident handling class a few years ago, the weekly course work you had to do off-line on your own (testing on your own test network, etc) - however, the last two weeks of class, you actually got to VPN into a SANS test network and play a capture the flag game by trying to penetrate some of their servers.  So it depends on how this class is being set up - I'm not sure if we'll have VPN access into SANS test network every week, or if again, it will be saved for the last few weeks - or - if the DVD they are setting up will have everything completely virtualized to allow for localized pen testing.

 So you might want to contact Ed via SANS as to how the hands on part will be handled if you have concerns.

John

 

No worries my friend. Of course, if you ever feel like a thread is turning towards a different topic, feel free to take it upon yourself to create a new one.

Thanks and welcome to EH-Net,
Don

I've taken two SANS course as instructor led boot camps. I can say that if at all possible, I won't do that again vs. taking OnDemand or @Home. The firehose of information was a bit overwhelming. These courses have a *lot* of information in them. Depending on your learning style, being able to absorb that slowly over several weeks, IMO, is preferable to having it dumped on you over 5 or 6 days.

I don't know about the hands on for GCIH@Home, but I looked into GPEN@Home. The one and only offering so far is currently ongoing (sadly, I could not take it for $$ reasons), and I did get confirmation that a "Hack Lab" of sorts would be available to the students for the duration of the course, which is spread over something like 6 or 10 weeks. That to me makes the @Home version of GPEN much more appealing that the classroom version.

Just to note, in case you aren't aware:
OnDemand - Canned, pre-recorded material completely at your own pace
@Home - Virtual interactive classroom with scheduled meetings, with previous sessions available if you miss them.