New Horizons Computer Learning Center

My work signed me up for an SQL course at New Horizons, I was skeptical at first when I heard that this was an online only course. To my surprise it was actually a great experience. We had a live (but remote) instructor, the software they used to display for the virtual classroom worked flawlessly and oue instructor was pretty good.
On the negative side the lab exercises for the course are too generic. They are for the most part completed by copy and pasting data and viewing the results. This can be helpful if you have a good grasp on the topic, however it also can work against you if you don’t get a topic as you can just copy and paste your way through a lab. For me it worked, for the less computer savy it might not.

I took an intro to Excel 2007 class at New Horizons and learned next to nothing. I am not very computer savvy and have been slowly figuring out how to use Excel on my own, for about 6 months, so I came into the class with a pretty bare bones understanding of Excel.
They billed the class as a full day workshop 8:30am-4:30pm and charged $ 275 for the day, which I thought was reasonable when I thought I was going to get a relatively intensive survey of Excel… but that is not at all what I got. The instructor started the class 25 minutes late, gave us an hour and a half of break time and let us out at 2:30pm – a full 2 hours early. So actual learning time amounted to about 4 and a half hours. I can only deduce that they stretch out a minimal amount of material over the course of the day so that they can charge full day prices.
What was really unbelievable was how shallow the training was.
We covered only the most basic functions of excel and the instructor actually refused to answer several of the students’ questions, saying that we would have to take the level 2 course in order to learn the answers. Frankly, what was considered level 1 and what was considered level 2 seemed completely arbitrary to me – he declined to explain sorting and filtering, saying that we’d have to enroll in Level 2. Totally unreasonable, especially given the inordinate amount of extra time we had at the end of the class. It was not as if he was pandering to a handful of slow students, everyone in the classroom was following along just fine and was eager to learn more. But the instructor had little to offer.
You would do better to pay an IT person or even an accountant for a few hours of one on one time. I can guarantee that you would learn more.