Academy Trainings - Feedback Space

#1

Want to engage the community on ideas, issues or improvement suggestions relating to our Academy‌ trainings?
Select one of the training courses below to leave your feedback‌!

7 Likes
#2

Good initiative. :slight_smile:

#3
#4

I’ve been leaving feedback as I went through the courses in the end surveys. Is that getting through?

1 Like
#5

@Janine_Columbres

#6

During the training on “Variables, Data Types & Control Flow”, there is an exercise to print the string variable “John Doe”. This variable was saved as the name “stringArray”. “stringArray” sounds awfully like a keyword for a datatype and is a poor naming convention for a variable. From a programming perspective this can cause confusion if you write a lot of code with a lot of objects. I would have used the variable name “full_name” or “fullName” to avoid possible confusion.

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1 Like
#7

General feedback across all the courses in the RPADeveloper series of courses. I am glad to see that that you’re offering training, and that it’s free. Most of my feedback is negative, since that’s how I roll. You can also consider it a list of things that can be improved, if you prefer that kind of word-algebra. While this feedback is mostly negative, these are all easy things that you do to can improve these courses. As things are right now, I’d give my overall experience a 5/10. If you fix all of these, this course could be a 9 or 10 out of 10.

The Academy website

  1. Finding the RPADeveloper course is too difficult. I could not search the net for it, I had to be given a specific link to find it.
  2. The design of the site is confusing. I always have to scroll down all the way, and then back up to find the RPADeveloper course that I am taking. I think what’s happening is that the middle of the webpage loads too slow, so I don’t see it until I come back up.
  3. The site logs you out too quickly.
  4. The login page requires username, not username or email like most websites, which usually results in me having to log in multiple times.

Taking the courses, primary LMS

  1. The primary LMS is kludgy and nonintuitive. For reference, see Udemy. Udemy is awesome, intuitive, slick, works well, and does not get in the way of me taking a course. Also note, I have to pay money to take courses there.
  2. The video player in the primary LMS is crap. It can’t remember volume settings, always turns on closed captioning, etc. I’ve never see a video player behave that poorly. Consult YouTube for a better browser based video player. It’s so bad, all I can say is pick a better one. JWPlayer works too.
  3. The primary LMS locks each item until you complete the previous one. This is annoying and slows things down. Did I mention this is REALLY annoying? See any other commercial LMS and none of them do that. I’ve never even had one in college do that.
  4. The course does not auto advance. This breaks immersion, and I have to fiddle with the UI, then reset all the things that the video player forgot, etc. It adds more to the annoyance. All other LMSs have auto advance. Except your secondary LMS.
  5. There is no feedback on what you got right or wrong on the quizzes, until you pass. This differs from all other LMSs. If you’re trying to prevent cheating, then just show what I got correct. There were several quizzes that I had to brute force, eventually figuring out the answers I 100% knew were right… were not. Given the quantity of you quiz Q&A’s posted online, it’s also apparent I’m not the only one with this problem.
  6. The people making the quizzes tried to be clever and failed on some of the Q&As. See my in-course feedback for those.

Taking the courses, secondary LMS
While generally way better than the primary LMS, there are a few issues with it.

  1. There’s no reason for this to be on a separate site, completely not integrated with the first.
  2. I missed some videos because I didn’t realize that you had to scroll right to see more panes.
  3. One of the later courses would not update the other LMS properly, and I had to redo lots of things because it could not keep track of what was going on.
  4. The resume feature in this LMS is broken/nonexistent. I had to redo the material and quizzes because it forgot them. It is technically broken, but the design is not good either.
  5. The content should be broken into chunks like every other LMS out there, including your primary one. The webpage appears to do this, but the backend does not, so that’s part of why the resume feature is broken. There is bad design and broken tech at play here.

Course content

  1. You don’t need a 15 second intro opening on every. single. video. We came to a UIPath site to get UIPath training, and are watching UIPath videos in a probably UIPath-custom video player on a UIPath custom website about UIPath automation. We know it’s UIPath. There is no way to not know this. Drop the intro on 99% of the videos. Leave it on the first one of each course if you like.
  2. The upbeat British guy was novel at first, but then it quickly became apparent that he wasn’t a techy guy. After a course or so, it became apparent that he wasn’t even driving the mouse. There’s nothing wrong with trying to make professional training videos, but this botched it.
  3. Get rid of stale content. About 50% of the courses are stale, being not relevant in some capacity. It could be that the content has been updated in a different course, or that there’s a newer better way to do it. I don’t mind lengthy courses, but I did not appreciate seeing the same material over and over and over and over again.
  4. Condense all of the OCR, vision, “AI Vision”, etc into 1 course. I get it, you want to talk about it. Condense it into 1 course, with only the up to date stuff. However, it’s really annoying to sit through multiple courses of the same content with different titles.
  5. I’m currently waiting on an assignment to be graded. And there are several posts saying it takes days. yet there’s no overview, documentation, explanation, troubleshooting steps, etc. talking about how to fix the problem, or what the problem might even be.

Downloading the software

  1. This is way to kludgy and complicated. See my posts in this thread for more of my thoughts.
  2. You have (had?) a bug when signing up to download the software with Firefox/Firefox-derived browsers.

Forums

  1. I hate Discourse. I realize that I’m the only person that does, but I’m still throwing that out there.
  2. I still have not had the automatic sync up between the academy site and the forum site allowing me more privileges. Does that even work?
  3. Why lock threads after 3 days? That’s really weird, and I don’t think it serves any kind of purpose except to create duplicates. Who wants duplicates?

Documentation

  1. You fall into the same trap as all other programming documentation. You state the obvious, and leave out the stuff I came for.
  2. If you are limited to VB or VB.net, you should state so clearly where ever relevant. Also, there are places where C# can be used for whatever reason, and that should be included with the documentation
  3. Internet search results often find documentation for older versions. These should be SEO’d to their appropriate place.
  4. When you find yourself at the older documentation, the link to 'the newer" documentation is a link to the root directory of a newer version. It should instead link to the newer version of the same article, or whatever might be most relevant.
4 Likes
#8

Hi @Robot.Builder.9001

We can’t have enough feedback, so thank you for that.

Let us see what answers we can provide. At once, I can address the ones you have about the Forum :slight_smile:

  1. I hate Discourse. I realize that I’m the only person that does, but I’m still throwing that out there.

    :no_mouth: We would appreciate a few constructive points here, as a lot can be adjusted based on that :slight_smile: I don’t want to disappoint you, but we currently love working with it :sweat_smile:

  2. I still have not had the automatic sync up between the academy site and the forum site allowing me more privileges. Does that even work?

    All platforms are soon moving to one login that will make things easier. For until then, this is the way to get the Advanced badge: UiPath Graduates Group

    You simply have to request to join the advanced group and then a robot will process your request within 10 minutes max.
    If you use the same email on both Academy and Forum, you can submit your request as is (default template). If you use different ones, please paste in the Academy email into the template.

  3. Why lock threads after 3 days? That’s really weird, and I don’t think it serves any kind of purpose except to create duplicates. Who wants duplicates?

    Actually, only the topics that have a post marked as a solution are closed. The 3-day period is a bit arbitrary and I agree that we can still fine-tune it, but the idea behind it stands strong. If the topic was solved, it will be closed. If a user has an issue around the same topic, they can reference the topic in question while providing their own unique context. We’re find with these types of ‘duplicates’.

1 Like
#9

I don’t like Discourse in general, it’s not your fault, that’s why I left it at that. But, since you asked:

The UI/Ux is:

  • Often blindingly white
  • Requires several domains of 3rd party javascript to run.
  • JS enabled vs JS Disabled visuals are very different, and jarring when I switch between them
  • Backwards-for-backwards-sake: type into the bottom, lack of hierarchical forums/subforums, etc.
  • So many popups. I think I’ve cleared them all here except for the auto suggest features… which are not helpful because I am an edge case.
  • I like to keep my games with my games, and my forums with my forums. The Stack Exchanges do a decent job of blending the two, but I’m not a fan on the forum.

The chat client and/or unified client (not relevant to this site)

  • Requires valid and real phone number verification
  • Centralized authentication service by DIscourse themselves
  • Routinely blocks me as I am trying to figure out what JS is needed to run the page
1 Like
#10

Hi @Robot.Builder.9001

Thank you for your feedback, we’re always interested in getting as much feedback as possible as to address the pain points that our users have.

Regarding our product documentation, I just want to say that it’s continuously changing and any suggestions get us closer to delivering clear, concise and most importantly, useful info.

  1. We’re trying to offer information both to beginner and advanced users, but we’re interested in knowing where we should go into more detail. Could you please tell us which capability you would like us to expand on more?

  2. It’s true that VB.net is primarily used in Studio, at least until C# support makes a comeback. But yes, Invoke Code activity can be used with C# and we also have an example in the documentation. We’ll look into ways of adding more info about this where relevant.

  3. We’ve been trying to improve in terms of SEO and progress was visible over the past few months. I’ll talk to my colleagues in charge of this, maybe they can optimize this even more.

  4. Yes, the platform that we’re using doesn’t remember the page that you were on when changing the version. I agree that it can get annoying especially if you’re navigating between versions. I’ve contacted them about this and am waiting for a reply. Hopefully, we can change this.

If you have more feedback on the documentation, we’d be happy to hear it. And please, don’t spare any details. :smile:

As a general note, you can also click on the Feedback button in the documentation and it automatically creates a draft in the User Voice -> Studio category. Or use the Suggest Edits feature to write to us directly. :slightly_smiling_face:

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#11

Hi @Robot.Builder.9001,

You mentioned both primary and secondary LMS, but I am not sure what you mean by that. I assume it is an LMS I will encounter in future modules (currently I’m on Level 1 Foundation Training). Is my assumption correct?

Also, I truly appreciate you taking the time to write out such detailed feedback - even if there’s not much I can do about it because I don’t work at UiPath. I often write similarly detailed trouble reports when submitting tickets to enterprise software support teams, only to have them completely ignored; it’s extraordinarily frustrating. By comparison, at least two UiPath folks have replied to your feedback already and it seems they made the effort to understand it, which is a very nice departure from what I’ve experienced.

Best,
JPG.

1 Like
#12

Hi @Robot.Builder.9001,

Many thanks for the detailed feedback. Really happy to see such interest in our Academy courses.

And yes, we do look at it as things to be improved, rather than negative feedback :slight_smile:

Let me cover some of the Academy-related issues.

Taking the courses, primary LMS.

This applies to all of the subpoints: we don’t build courses in this format anymore. All of our Academy courses (released since April '19) have been built (and will continue to be so) using newer and better authoring technologies (what you are referring to as the second LMS).

That being said, we still have some Live courses on the platform that need to be updated to our new standards - just a matter of 2-3 months.

Taking the courses, secondary LMS

  1. You are not actually leaving the site. You are opening what is called a SCORM package (this is the actual training wrapper) and we’ve set it up to open in a (almost) Full Screen frame within the same window. That way you only see the content you need to see - no useless buttons or other UI elements that you do not need while going through the content - and when you click the close button it will lead you back to the course UI.

  2. We’ve recently added instructions on scrolling in the intro section of our courses, just so we make sure our learners don’t miss anything.

03 & 04 We are aware of the progress reset issue. We are working with the LMS provider to fix this. Kind of a thorny issues, especially because we understand how frustrating losing progress is. We hope to fix this asap.

  1. We aim to break down content as much as possible, where it makes sense. For most learners, going from one course container to another is frustrating, so we aim to strike a balance on this matter.

The resume issue is not caused by the way the content is structured - we already looked into this possibility.

Course content

  1. We share content (including videos) outside of the LMS with clients and training partners, so all our materials need to be branded.

  2. We do use a voiceover artist for most of the videos on our Academy courses. It provides consistency and clarity to our presentations.

  3. Would need some details on this in order to address it. Can you give an example of 2 courses overlapping in terms of content? If you are referring to the Production Ready Essentials course and the new RPA Developer Foundation, the latter replaces the former…if you are seeing both on the LMS, it is because you are still enrolled to the Essentials course; it will be deactivate soon.

  4. Good suggestion. Their coverage reflects the progress of the product and the features. Moving forward, we will unify it and probably have it on 2 levels - intro and advanced.

  5. Aware of this issue. We’re working on it.

1 Like
#13

Hi @jpg90,

Let me clarify the matter of the LMS.
It is not a new LMS (learning platform), but a different authoring tool (tool used to build and deliver the training content).
Regarding the Level 1 Foundation course, you may have enrolled in the previous version of the course. We have recently launched a new RPA Developer Foundation course. Here is an enrollment link: https://academy.uipath.com/lms/index.php?r=course/deeplink&course_id=718&generated_by=233501&hash=dccdb4585ae5744eb5c323fb4e149b204c7db4b2.
We have still kept the old course opened for the users that already had enrolled prior to the update. Just so that they would be able to opt to finish the old version of the course.
Let us know if you need any other clarifications.

2 Likes
Old / Wrong Course? Cause of Error?