Are we there yet?

Communications News, May, 1998 by Leonard Greenberg

Distance learning offers many routes of travel and ways to transport your training information via the Internet.

After being bombarded with hype about the Web and spending hours "surfing" it, what do we really know about the Internet? We know that:

* it's a worldwide network of computers;

* the World Wide Web is one big document whose pages are connected by a bunch of hyperlinks; and

* it's accessible wherever there's a good telephone connection.

Why does this interest the training world? Not since the mainframe has there been a way to publish computer-based training (CBT) one time and make it simultaneously available to thousands of people from one central location over a standard network. The Web seems so easy: just buy an HTML authoring tool and start developing and publishing media-rich content for the world to see. No more messy CDs or manuals. The Web promises to fulfill the training ideal--instruction anytime and anywhere.

But take a second look. From a technology standpoint, the Web looks more like a poorly planned state highway without road signs than the autobahn we dream of. Today's standard browser rocket is tomorrow's abandoned jalopy. The fierceness of the battle between Seattle (Microsoft) and Silicon Valley (Sun, Netscape, etc.) over control of Internet standards is driving technology changes at an unprecedented rate. No single tool for developing Web-based training can claim to be the standard solution.

Before developers head down the information highway, their CEOs will expect them to know what really works for Web-based training, and what doesn't. Which features are easy to implement and which require a computer science degree? Can courses be maintained and administered? Is the approach cost-effective? Is it sophisticated training or just text with pictures and sound?

IS IT CENTRALLY ADMINISTERED?

Centralized administration is the most pivotal feature of a comprehensive training program. Central administration gives training professionals the tools to ensure that employees are taking appropriate training, that they've mastered the content, and that their activity is recorded.

Centralized administration lets authors and designers gauge the content's effectiveness. Centralized administration includes computer-managed instruction (CMI), which enables administrators to use the computer to manage a student's personal training plan over the network. A robust CMI system provides pre- and post-testing, automatic bookmarks, mastery enforcement, order enforcement, question randomization and retry, and time limits.

VARIETIES OF COURSE DELIVERY

As training departments grapple with these considerations, let's start with the fact that courses are being delivered over the Internet today in three basic ways: downloaded files, HTML/Java, and streaming courseware. In each approach, students can start courses by clicking on a Web page. The major differences have numerous implications depending on your training strategy and budget.

At first blush, downloading files doesn't seem like much of an Internet standard. But it's actually the most-often-used Internet function. FTP, the Internet's file transfer protocol, was one of the first standards in place after TCP/IP. Internet pioneers who were sharing research papers needed some way to share documents with their fellow academics. Through FTP, every Web page is downloaded to the local computer and cached before it is displayed in your favorite browser.

The same mechanism applies to making popular CD-ROM-based courses available over the Internet. The easiest way to make this instruction available over the Internet today is to allow the student to download the existing courses, install them, and run them locally.

Once the course is installed, the student needn't worry about Internet traffic and lost connections. It's not elegant, not state of the art, but it works, and it requires no re-authoring. (Oh, don't forget that the vendor's multimedia player needs to be installed on the local machine.)

So what's the problem? These files, which are usually media-rich, are huge. Downloading these files can take hours and hog network bandwidth--if your hard drive will even accommodate them. Who wants these large files sitting around on the computer after a course is completed? And remember the central control and administration discussed earlier? It's out the window. Central CMI and scores? Forget it. Training organizations are at the mercy of the student to report back to them.

There are some work-arounds. Organizations can do some minor re-authoring and cut big courses into easy-to-download chunks. They can write uninstall programs or let the browser's cache handle the clean-up. But as long as they have to re-author, or if they don't have a lot of old courseware, why not go "native" and author in HTML? That's what all the magazines are telling us to do.

COURSE DESIGN TO PAGE LAYOUT

To go native, the user buys an HTML authoring tool. Fortunately, in 1998 these too s ma e setting up a Web page as easy as using a word processor. What you see is what you get, and users need little knowledge of the cryptic HTML coding language to create pages. Pages can include all sorts of color, sound, and graphics, and interesting ways to display content.