Back in the day.......

I thought I would share my e-learning experience (not te-L as it was not teaching) with you all.....

~~~wavy lines~~~
~~~wavy lines~~~

The year is 1986, the month was September, Sperry Rand and Burroughs merge to form Unisys, becoming the second largest computer company, and I was a few months away from taking my First Class exam (I was an air cadet, respect to 2210 Cowley Squadron)

I was just a geeky 13 year old boy with a passion for computers and a love of military helicopters....one evening on my way home from an evening of Drill and Aircraft Recognition I began to think about my impending exam....

So I thought to myself....why don’t I combine my programming skills with a need to pass this exam. Well two weekends later I had put together my very first e-learning application, written on a Spectrum + in BASIC.

It went through two rewrites, the first version required the person to enter the entire answer, an example of a question would be:

What engine powers a DeHavilland Chipmunk?

A) Gipsy Major 8
B) 2× Turbo-Union RB199-34R Mk 103 afterburning turbofans
C) 2× Rolls-Royce/Turbomeca Adour Mk 102 turbofans

The answer would have to be typed in full in order to get the marks.

This was a bit long winded so the second revision changed it so only the letter had to be entered.

It worked, a few others used it and we all passed the exam (I got a merit so I didn’t do too badly, perhaps if I had spent more time studying than programming it may have been a distinction!)

and FYI:

B belongs to a Panavia Tornado and C belongs to a SEPECAT Jaguar!

We now leap forward in time to the year 2001 (cue Also Sprach Zarathustra!) we all survived the Y2K apocalypse and I’m working as a web developer / designer at a company called CCH Seminars (Part of teh Chroner group who are massive!). CCH Seminars provide seminars for accountants (ptew ptew) so they can top up their CPD points and carry on fleecing clients legally.

6 months before I started someone had the idea of recording the lectures onto CD and sticking them online instead of having accountants (ptew ptew) travel to seminars.

So I turned up and my primary job was to look after the site and also to look into developing it into THE central point for accountants (ptew ptew) to get their CPD points online.

The recording of the seminars proved to be too long so a shorter length (10-15 mins) was suggested. While this was more popular with the listeners the governing bodies wanted something visual as well.

So we took what was an mp3 file (or a podcast years before they became 'trendy') stuck it into Flash and used Flash to provide the visual stimulus.

The governing bodies were happy, so were the 450 accountants (ptew ptew) who bought the product, as they could enrol online, download the seminars and watch/listen to them from home.

However, it was 2001 and accountants (ptew ptew) had dialup both at home and at work so downloading around 20 x 5MB files took ages!

So I developed a CD-ROM version which meant that instead of downloading the files they were sent out on a CD-ROM. We pretty much double the number of accountants (ptew ptew) within a few months of launching the service.

I looked into the following technologies to increase the accountants (ptew ptew) learning experience, these were:

Online Forums - We were going to advertise these as place to ask questions

Online Chat Room - The plan was to use these for live Q&A sessions with guest presenters. Very expensive chat room software was bought and set up in a test environment.

Unfortunately due to redundancy (yeah....after making them all that money through my hard work and research) these were never introduced.

There have been various other e-learning projects that I have undertaken but these were small one-offs and a bit pants!

So there you go.....blazing an e-learning trail since 1986!