My experience as AST BBST Co-instructor

Credit: associationforsoftwaretesting.org

In this post I will give my experience as AST BBST instructor for course Instructor Course. I am member of Associations for Software Testing and I successfully passed Foundations and Instructor course. These are prerequisites to be eligible to take Instructor course. When I successfully finish Instructor course, I got detailed instructions how to enroll as AST BBST Instructor.

 It is important to state that BBST is a registered trademark of Kaner Fiedler & Associates LLC. Being AST BBST instructor is a volunteer activity.

BBST Instructor is the least demanding course, so in my context that I have eight hour daily job and family, it was a good starting point as instructor. I create commitment for myself and that is that I will read every student post related to course lab activities.

Lead instructors were Justin Rohrman and Markus Gärtner. Justin first send Google spreadsheet with instructor task list. I could apply for any of those tasks, and every task had a deadline stated. Using that information, I could manage my workload and decide (given that this was my first course as instructor) which task to choose. My first task was to review the student task list spreadsheet and is everything ok with moodle course site (links,  text, forums). I choose lesson preview tasks. I needed to give students brief introduction what is next lesson all about. I put first draft in instructors forum in order to get feedback from lead instructors.

As I was reading student post to lesson lab task, I also provide several feedbacks using my knowledge that I gained in Instructor course as a student. In the end we needed to provide for every student our pass/fail decision along with comments for fail decision.

I had several takeaways from being co instructor. First was that by providing lesson previews and student feedback I actually did a recap of lesson materials which helped me to better comprehend and extend my understanding of Instructor course materials. In total I spend 12 hours over the two and a half week course duration. Second was that by reading student responses I also extended my Instructor course knowledge. I met a Miagi-Do School of Software testing instructor, Michael Corum, and Lucas Dargis uTest community contributor, testers for which I heard before by reading their blog posts.

I recommend you to become AST BBST Instructor if you want to share your knowledge with other testers and to extend and recap your knowledge from AST BBST courses. However, you also need to put some commitments from your side, and that is your free time.