Wednesday, January 27, 2010

CHALLENGE: How do you develop courses when you have a bandwidth limitation?

When bandwidth is limited or screen real estate is limited (eg. old computer, mobile phone), the best approach is to go back to basic HTML & JavaScript. These are the underlying technologies that make the web work. Most training can be done without relying on Flash, Silverlight, Video, or other plug-in based multimedia content. However, for those users who do have good connections and reasonable screen real estate, you can still offer the higher bandwidth content.
If you're looking for authoring tools to help you along, you should consider tools that output content as basic web pages. The ReadyGo Web Course Builder is one such product. The underlying files can easily be delivered with low bandwith (e.g. 9600 baud connection), but if you want to include Flash, Video, Audio, etc. these can easily be incorporated into the content at the course author's discretion.