• Background
• CLASS Project
• CLASS Staff
• General Insights
• Questions & Considerations
• Content
• Development Teams
• Content Acquisition
• Assessment & Grading
• Design
• Introduction
• Modeling
• Presentation
• Interactivity
• Navigation
• Assessments
• National Standards
• Quality Assurance
• Courses
• Features
• Courses
• Copyrights
• Technology
• Building a Course
• See and Say
• There are Limits!
• Influence and Change
• CLASS Courses
• Content
• Extras Designed
• Extras Linked
• Class Assessments
• A Bit of Dreamweaver
• Proofing
• Graphics
• MOUs
• Detailing Treatment
• Course Credits
• CLASS Style
• Publications

Bandwidth (aka, Who do you design for?)

Just like the decision about using a learning management system (LMS), this is a very fundamental issue. Designing courses for everyone, whether dial-up or broadband, Mac™ or PC, Netscape™ or IE, will very narrowly define what elements you can include in your courses.

One of the core concepts of CLASS™ was that students would learn in a multimedia-rich environment. To alleviate the pain of users on a 14.4 modem, CDs were sent to the student. The entire course was on the CD, including the large movie and audio files that brought the course to life, but that were time-consuming to download.

Do not try to design for everyone. The original CLASS™ research project was to work with technology that was industry-promised to be three to five years from common availability. The CLASS™ project was intended to build leading edge technology based courseware. Almost immediately, the focus changed to a development and distribution project. The research aspect of technology and constructivists theory was creating great difficulties with the users – teachers and students alike. Independent learners require much more interaction with the content and a very reliable technology base for delivery. Distribution of CLASS™ courses very early on was focusing on learning centers or classroom settings. Virtually every school or learning center had a different technology infrastructure with network access policy and security systems.

Courses designed to be rich in multimedia and web interactivity where content was placed on a CD for ease and speed of download were great for the individual. However, they were less than acceptable for the learning centers because of their intranets, proxy servers and firewalls. Independent learners and schools are two very different markets for technology based coursework.

While creating courses for every user is admirable, it is no longer feasible or desirable. Building courses that can be used both by someone operating on an ancient Macintosh™ and using Netscape Gold™ and someone on a Pentium 4™ using Internet Explorer 6™ produces the worst of both worlds: courses that are too high-demand for slower systems, but that don't take advantage of the possibilities offered by higher-end systems. Thus, know your user! If you intend to distribute courses to users that you KNOW will have access to broadband, then take advantage of that capability. If you KNOW that your users will be geographically isolated and will, at best, have 28.8 modems, then design to that level. Don't try to accede to the demands of everyone.

Another, very unpopular option is to create multiple HTML versions of the same course. When the student enters the course, he/she will be presented with the options (high low, medium, Flash™, no Flash™, etc. The obvious downside to this is that you are creating multiple versions of the same course, which can make version control, bookkeeping, and even routine maintenance and error corrections impossible. Today the use of xml, which allows the same material to be presented in a myriad of ways, from the high end users to Personal Digital Assistants, or PDAs is more straight forward and maintainable.

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