Labs need updating?

[WigF1]

Hi,

Given the major update from the end of May, shouldn't the labs be significantly updated? As it is, a lot of the labs are woefully out of date and do not match the content covered in the course.

Are there plans to change the labs to suppor the new content?

[FMCovington]

I just finished delivering the May 2026 revision of AZ-040T. I was disappointed that the erroneous slide content and typos haven't been corrected. As I recall, some are the same as they've been since they were part of the of 10961C course. Instructors are left correcting incorrect content, apologizing for misplaced hyphens in long word-wrapped command lines, and escorting the attendees, step-by-step, through cloud exercises that simply do not work as written.

Lab 10 is a flaming fiasco. I would dare any author to complete the steps exactly as written and succeed with the entire lab. It has never worked as written. What's more, it serves little purpose to provide 10 launches over a 180-day period when there is no cleanup of cloud exercise steps, making it impossible for the students to re-do the lab. There should be a final step, perhaps scripted into a single clickable text box, to undo everything the student has done in the entire lab. At the end of Lab 9, Azure, students delete all their steps by removing their resource group. Bravo. I realize it is not so simple for Lab 10, but it can be done. I give my students a script I wrote to do exactly that, so they can repeat the labs as long as their temporary cloud-slice account permits.

But I shouldn't have had to create that script. The author(s) of the labs should test them thoroughly before releasing them and consider the students' touted benefit lab access after the course. What good is the access if the labs don't reset and thus cannot be repeated?

As for the typos, misguided content, and ill-formatted slide bullets, etc., a qualified technical editor should review every slide for accuracy and make corrections as needed. It appears that has never been done--not even back during the 10961 era. If you would like such an editor, I'll be happy to send you my rate chart.

I should not be surprised to see very low student evaluations for the courseware this week. If they are high, it is because I corrected inaccuracies and supplied personal lecture and demos to explain material oversights and joked my way through the slide bullet formatting and hyphen errors, chuckling that PowerPoint must have caused them with its autoformatting or that in one particular case, the proofreader must have rested their arm against the Enter key while answering a phone call.

Despite its many problems, AZ-040T remains my favorite MOC course to deliver. Perhaps that's ironically because it's so seldom overhauled and therefore intimately familiar to teach.

Please show interest in this course by at least cleaning up the slides and making the labs work as written.

Thanks.

F. M. (Mike) Covington, PhD, PCPP, MCT