Guys...thank you so much for your input. Hopefully more responses will follow...the more the better. I have taught "college level" CAD courses and now I teach Mechanical CAD Drafting full time at a vocational high school so I have seen almost every level of new user to experienced. Teaching younger students (students that have been raised with computers) has been the easiest.
I'm not sure being young is the answer. I might suggest you get young students that self select for this training as opposed to an older person that may get thrown into it. It is hard to say but I'd like to relate an experience I had in high school in the very early seventies.
We had a drafting course available in high school that guys would opt in for. I say guys because gals where not in the class. In any event I found that I could grasp and draw (as on paper) the assigned tasks with great speed. Of course these would be considered trivial designs today but generally I could knock out a drawing in a few minutes. That is long as I didn't need to letter anything. One day the kid next to me had issues with drawing the item we were tasked with. So we swapped velum and he lettered my drawing while I did the the drafting work on his.
What it comes down to in my mind is that some people are far more adapted than others to visualization in the mind. The kid above was generally intelligent but for some reason just couldn't model the object in his brain.
On the flip side when computers started to become affordable I had big problems with the opaque interfaces common in those days. For me a text editor was near useless if I had to memorize arcane commands. Maybe that was a motivation issue, sometimes when you are young sitting at a computer for hours to learn an arcane command set just blows. The introduction of the Mac and with it GUI interfaces was like a gift from god.
GUIs work great for many applications yet with CAD it took a long time to develop GUIs and worst most of the GUI interfaces for CAD don't really work that well. So you still have a very step learning curve. If you couple that learning curve with somebody that can't visualize the part then you have big problems.
I still teach part-time college courses at night and the toughest for me is teaching CAD to older students (those who did not grow up with computers). One particular student was taking my CAD-1 class, it is designed for people with little to no CAD experience. He was about 55 years of age and had never used a computer prior to taking my class.
That is a problem right there, if you haven't had prior computer exposure throwing somebody on a machine to learn CAD is an impossible situation in my mind. People need to have a certain level of skill with respect to computers prior to jumping into CAD training. I'm not talking using E-Mail or a web browser either here. In a nut shell I think it is a big mistake letting somebody into a CAD class of any sort without a demonstrable skill level with a computer.
The challenge was not just teaching the CAD software but teaching computer basics at the same time. It was frustrating for me because this student earned an "A" in the rest of his courses but a "D" in my class. (the other courses did not require a computer)
The course may not require a computer but it should require a certain amount of computer skills prior to sign up.
I worked with him before and after class. He also received extra help from other instructors and class mates.
I think this demonstrates that somebody was in over his head. Interestingly I think computers require some of the same visualization skills that drafting requires. At times you need to be able to visualize what is going on within a computer when you command it to do certain things. Let's face it not everybody has these skills and frankly not everybody can be taught to do any one task.
In this case though I'm not sure if it was an inherent ability the individual lacked or simply not being prepared. Some place in the mix is the issue of fear, believe it or not I've seen people that actually fear computers.
As a point of reference I work in manufacturing supporting advanced manufacturing hardware. A technician if you will. Since I've been around for awhile I've had to train and or evaluate new people. Sometimes you get people in that you know within a few days won't be able to handle the job. You can see it in their eyes at times or in the questions they ask or comments made. It is like their minds are so out of sync with the reality on front of them that it is hopeless to proceed. The best you can do is cut them loose.
After this experience I decided to do some research to see if other teachers were having this problem, and what they were doing to fix it. I have a ton of information about adult learners and new technology but very little regarding the adult learner and CAD technology. The information you have provided is perfect. This data will help me refine my research paper and hopefully help me to teach future adult learners more effectively. Thanks again...and keep it coming!
In this discussion the one thing I see as a big problem is putting somebody into a position where there is to much going on all at once. Trying to learn basic computer skills on top of CAD just seems a bit much. This should have been dealt with as a remedial issue much like people often need to take refresher math classes or even prerequisites before even registering for a program. Frankly if a person can't grasp the basic computer skills required there is little reason to register them into a course where CAD work is significant. It basically is a waste of time in my mind.
Look at it this way, some (most) people grasp the basics of computer operation fairly quickly. If they don't there are three possibilities that I can think of that will cause the problem. As noted fear is one issue, it can really inhibit people's use of a computer. The second is the inability to visualize what is going on. This is a big issue and I'm not sure how to address it, not every bodies mind works the same way. The third possibility is stupidity, which doesn't appear to be an issue here due to the success in the other course work. So it really comes down to having the right skills set prior to jumping into the course.
