Formal Course Evaluation: Fill & Download for Free

No, because such online courses only offer textbook physics knowledge, not research skills. You won’t learn how toevaluate the research results of others critically (e.g. find gaps in reasoning)formulate a research questionconnect experimental data to theoretical modelsbreak a problem down into its componentswrite up your results for publicationread research papersBeing a theoretical physicist in much more than learning about theoretical models. At its core, its about chipping away at questions in physics and trying to make sense of patterns. You can’t learn these things from online courses because a lot of the tools of the trade cannot be taught in a formal course which presents to you highly compressed, cleaned up knowledge/information in a digestible format. Real research is unfortunately very messy and error-filled.

Since I received a request to answer this, I’m going to assume the question is asking “how well are U.S. Army Infantry soldiers trained.”For starters, each Infantryman receives about 4 months of OSUT (One Station Unit Training) where they seamlessly transition from Basic Training to Advanced Individual Training. But your “basic” training is really just an introduction into the lifestyle more than anything else.Once you arrive at your unit, training will be constant. It may be classroom training or time on the rifle range, but an Infantryman will almost always be training.During garrison time, that’s time when you’re not in combat or on a field training exercise, classes pretty much run around the clock. If soldiers are sitting around doing nothing, somebody had better start teaching a class. This is what we’d call informal training, where a team leader or anyone who is qualified to teach a certain skill will just start teaching something because there is time to kill.Then you have those field training exercises. It’s hard to put a quantitative number to the amount of field training that goes on, mostly because of deployment cycles. But when an Infantryman is not deployed, they can expect to spend a significant amount of time training on ranges and in the field. These field training exercises would include rotations to major training facilities such as the Joint Readiness Training Center and the National Training Center.Beyond that, you have tons of other courses that the average Joe (entry level soldier) might take. These include unit run classes like the Combat Lifesaver Course that would be run by the Battalion medical platoon, to more formal training like Air Assault School.This is all entry level stuff for an Infantryman. As a soldier progresses through his (soon to include her) career, he will be expected to attend a variety of other formal courses.As a minimum requirement, each promotion through the NCO ranks has a leadership school that he must complete before being promoted. These schools have the same structure as non-Infantry personnel, but most (with the exception of WLC/PLDC) are branch specific.Also during this period, generally that E-4 to E-6 range, many more advanced schools open up. Three that I attended that fall into this range are Ranger School, Pathfinder School, and Mountain Warfare School. These are just a handful of the schools that a junior leader in the Infantry might take advantage of. Other junior leaders would attend others and we would cross-train as well as teach the most practical skills to the entry-level soldiers.As you continue to progress in your career, roughly E-7 and above, you’ll be attending more “gentleman” style training. This includes more of those promotion courses for NCOs, but also other things like classified mission debriefs from returning units and professional seminars. You’ll also be given the opportunity to participate in evaluating other units, which is a great way to pick up new techniques and ideas from peers and other soldiers.Of course, none of this even touches on the officers, but I wasn’t an officer and will leave that for a former officer to address if they’d like.Ultimately, the U.S. Army Infantry is probably the best trained Infantry in the world. The one glaring weakness I saw as I was leaving was the loss of administrative skills. Due to the constant deployments, many were losing these skills as 100% effort was going towards mission readiness.

Nothing of any value.I evaluate programmers for a living and although all programmers are self taught to some extent, the thing you get from a formal course is being told things you don’t want to know.When you teach yourself things, you go for things you find interesting or that apply to the work you are doing. The problem you face is that you don’t know what will be useful beyond your current work and some bits of programming will not interest you.So you need a syllabus. If you stick to that, then you can teach yourself anything that you can be taught, but most people need to be pushed into keeping to it.