POOR PRIVATE COURSES

Subscribers to many educational programmes in Baku find themselves condemned to a treadmill of courses and spend their lives vainly chasing a lucky break, just like the main characters of the novel "The Twelve Chairs" by Ilya Ilf and Yevgeniy Petrov, ending up with a certified "half-education".

After passing one level or another of a computer or language course, the poor student is forced onto the next course. If there are reasons why he cannot do so, for example, for financial concerns, organizers aware of his position, try to compress the whole teaching process into one level. And the result is not always successful.

Of course, we cannot claim that all educational courses available in Baku are ineffective. Perhaps some have been lucky, but not the author of this article who attended computer courses organized by two teaching companies at the same time. For obvious reasons, we do not want to name them. But it does not matter because the situation around teaching courses in all companies that offer such services is, in principle, similar. There are small differences in prices.

By advice or advert

It is interesting that administrators say almost the same thing while displaying their licence. "We are veterans of this business in Baku and have been on the market for about 10 years." But what arouses suspicion is not the length of their existence, but the quality of teaching - the reason why people attend these courses. On the whole, very few listeners ask them to show their licence. They come at random, after hearing about the course from someone or after seeing an advert. Most of them choose courses near their home or work. There are so many teaching courses in Baku. But can you trust them and believe that in a short period of time they will teach you to be an accountant, designer or to be fluent in a foreign language? What can you get out of 12 lessons in a private education centre? They tried to persuade us that they would offer a flexible pricing policy and arrange a convenient time for lessons. But they failed to please us on both counts. The teachers are overloaded - they have about seven lessons per day and about 20 students per week. It is too much for one teacher and not really effective for students who do not have enough time.

"The quality of teaching here is absolutely different from other courses which appear in the capital like mushrooms overnight. One teacher has 40 students there. We have good conditions here - a clean and spacious office, a wide range of educational programmes and professionals work here." Administrators said almost the same thing everywhere.

The range of educational services is quite broad at these centres: practical accounting, accounting, international standards of financial accountability, SIMA in English, GMAT in English. The duration of one lesson is 60 minutes and the number of lessons at each level is from 8 to 12. Prices fluctuate from 60 to 200 manats, depending on the venue, whether it is an individual or group lesson and on how vocationally useful the course ie. whether it answers your main question - will this knowledge, for example, GMAT, help you get a job in a foreign company?

Computer courses offer a standard package - MS-Office (Windows, Word, Excel, Internet, Power Point, Acess) Corel Draw, Adobe Photoshop, Quarkexpress, Archi CAD, Auto CAD, 3D Max, Delfi, C++, Pascal, Visual Basic. In this case, the prices - from 30 to 160 manats - increase not just because you need to have a standard package of computer skills, but also because it is fashionable. For example, the profession of designer is in high demand today. Prices for computer courses are sharper, even for the simplest design programme - Corel Draw. Twelve lessons cost from 40 to 100 manats, depending on whether they are held individually, in the company's office, in an outside office "in the city centre", "outside the city centre" and so on. The coolest design programme, 3D MAX, costs from 70 to 120 manats. Programmes like Delfi, C++, Pascal, Visual Basic - your passport to countries that need programmers - cost from 80 to 160 manats.

Language courses excite your imagination. There are so many things on offer. English with local teachers, native speakers from the USA and Britain: Azerbaijani, Arabic, Hungarian, Greek, Italian, Serbo-Croat, Czech and even such exotic languages as Japanese and Chinese. They teach 18 languages. Every level consists of 8 or 12 lessons of 60 minutes each, while prices fluctuate from 40 to 195 manats. Individual lessons, lessons for two or three people, outside the office and so on are offered as well.

In both places, I was asked to sign an agreement to attend 12 lessons of computer courses in Windows, MS-Office and Internet. The agreement specified the price, type of lessons and conditions regarding missing lessons. Missing lessons are not compensated if the student himself misses them.

The teaching process…

The teaching process itself was at a very low level. Since I had an idea of Word, they moved onto Excel straight away. In the first lessons, they taught me to draw tables in Excel and make simple calculations. With every lesson, there were more and more tables and the tasks became more and more difficult. But all I did in the lessons was draw tables all the time. That's it. The teachers had files with methodological material, drawn mainly from the Internet. The tables and diagrams were drawn on the basis of this material.

There is one big minus to all these courses. Once the course has finished, all the skills you learn literally "evaporate" from your head, because they become unnecessary. Even the most perfect training should be backed up by practice. But if you attend a course, receive a certificate and fail to get a job after that, you won't be able to use your knowledge anywhere. Some time later, your brain will lose this knowledge because you do not need it.

In principle, the assertion that the level of teaching on educational courses is low was confirmed after I looked through several Russian websites of educational courses offering a number of services and Excel teaching programmes the way they should be. The Excel educational programme is quite extensive, but the most important thing is that it is impossible to learn it without learning the terminology which accompanies it and which my teachers never used. I acquired knowledge of the main elements of the Excel programme, which means using pages - copying, moving and renaming. A student will be able to insert data, edit, copy and move it, hide and show rows and columns and arrange data in groups. However, they never told me how to check data. Superficial knowledge was given on editing electronic tables, changing the background of cells and creating frames for cells, while there was no information at all about ways of creating page headers. I have no idea how to fix rows and columns, split windows, protect information, reform it or copy a table into the Word programme. They did not show me how to paste Excel working sheets (probably the same as in Word). As for using formulas and functions - creating formulas, copying, autocorrelation, money symbols - of course, this is all a matter of practice.

Technical support at these educational centres leaves something to be desired. It is not clear why the management of educational centres has still not provided its students with new equipment: computers based on the Pentium III processor and ELT monitors take up a lot of space on the desk. If the education centres made no profit, then logically they would cease to exist.

Courses are attended by various strata of the population - students, unemployed and even pensioners. Almost no school-leavers come here, as they probably do not trust them. However, if educational centres are still popular, there is probably a reason for that.

We should also say that private educational centres do not test the professional suitability of their teachers. Of course, it would be an exaggeration to say that teachers are employed literally from the street. But it turned out that most of them do not even have university diplomas. They are students, either from the Azerbaijani State University of Economics or from the Azerbaijani State Languages University. Course administrators say that when they select staff, they just have to trust people who say that they are masters of their profession and can teach people. Licences are issued by the Ministry of Education.

To some extent, the work of educational courses is overseen by the state. The head of staff at the Education Ministry, Ilham Pirverdiyev, told R+ that, until 2005, kindergartens, special and professional technical institutions of education and educational courses were overseen by the Azerbaijani Education Ministry. Then they were placed under the jurisdiction of the Cabinet of Ministers. "Many problems in the work of these centres were not solved." For this reason, the president issued a decree in 2006 returning control of kindergartens and special and professional technical institutions of education to the Education Ministry, except for educational courses. According to Pirverdiyev, licences to independent educational centres are issued by the Ministry of Justice. The ministry registers all centres working in this sphere. As for the curriculum of courses, it is approved by the Azerbaijani Institute for Problems in Education which adapts school and university textbooks to courses. However, this institute is not in a position to test all teachers working in the educational courses sector. Pirverdiyev said that 90 per cent of independent education centres have no curriculum at all. Apart from the Ministry of Justice and the Institute for Problems in Education, the educational courses sector is also under the jurisdiction of the Tax Ministry. But many of those "worn out by courses" believe that the state should toughen control over this sphere of services. How? This is another subject of discussion.