A bookstore with a difference (Barnes & Noble)

Member Name: tweepypie

Product:	Barnes & Noble
Date:	12/04/02 (116 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: international shipping, free courses

Disadvantages: next day delivery to UK not possible (obviously)

UPDATE: 23/07/02

After having been unavailable for the past month or two, B&N university is now up and running again. The first courses start on 5 August, but enrollment is already possible.

What are the changes?
Well, the main change is that most of the courses are not free anymore (called “Premier Courses”). Most of the courses now cost around $70 and more. They promise you more instructor involvement this time though. Courses include Access, Excel, CSS, the Craft of Knitting (seriously!), Spanish for Beginners, etc.

There are still free courses available though, including DHTML, Astrology, Writing for Children, etc.

Hopefully they will soon offer more courses than those available now, because generally speaking I have found them quite good in the past.


PREVIOUS:

I really like this website. Ok, I don’t live in America and can’t really take advantage of their offers, right? Wrong. Firstly, they do offer international shipping, and bearing in mind it’s got a long way to go, it’s not actually that expensive. They do offer an extremely wide variety of subject-matters (and even have rare items or try to find them for you), offer you the chance to leave comments on books, give excellent information on their products etc. In this respect it doesn’t really differ from amazon.co.uk et al. that much, but that’s not really the reason I like this website.

Apart from its Bookstore and magazine subscriptions, it also offers e-books which you can pay for via the Internet and download onto your computer. All the software necessary to read them is also available. There is actually quite a wide variety in this section, from fitness to business.

My favourite, however, is the University section (“Online Courses”). It offers loads of courses, from Tarot for Beginners, Italian for Travellers to all sorts of Computer Courses. All you have to do i
s register and enrol for the class(es) of your choice. And it’s free! Once you have enrolled, you will receive an e-mail informing you that the first lesson (and then all subsequent lessons) has been posted.

If you then go to their site and log in, you will see, on the left-hand side, your Organizer with links for all your courses. If you follow that link, you will have 4 options: you can click on “Overview”, providing with, yes, you’ve guessed it, an overview of your chosen course, “Lessons”, giving you a brief description of all the lessons and a link to the relevant lessons, once they have been posted, “Classroom”, which is basically a message board, and finally “Materials”, providing you with the titles of the materials that “you will need”. That’s presumably how they make money from those courses, but surprisingly, you don’t actually need those materials. Of course, if you decided to go for their C++ programming course, having the relevant capabilities would be advisable, but generally speaking you don't have to buy their recommended materials. And you certainly don’t have to buy them there.

The lessons themselves are, generally speaking, well-structured, well-explained and usually give you the opportunity to quickly check if you have understood everything, by providing a link at the end of the lesson, leading to an “assessment site” (Quiz). You also get to do “homework”, but again, only if you want to.

You also have access to your own personal calendar and folder (for taking notes). You can find the relevant links in the left-hand margin.

On the other hand, they are constantly looking for teachers, so if you have some knowledge you would like to share, just contact them. And don’t forget what it will look like on your CV!

I am currently enrolled in three of their courses. On average, they cove
r all the basics in about 5 to 7 weeks, but each weekly lesson being just about the right size to be learned within an hour or so. The practising will, of course, take as long as it takes or as long as you want it to take, but it seems just about right to me. If you are interested, just visit them at www.barnesandnoble.com. If you have any further questions, they also have an faq site. You can also contact them via e-mail, and they usually respond within 24 to 48 hours.

Why not give it a go? You never know, you might learn something…

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