As the fabled Yogi Berra was reported to have said, “It’s like déjà vu all over again!”
Some twenty-five years ago, I started a web site (this one, but in raw HTML) to learn the emerging technologies that would power the Worldwide Web. Now, it seems I’m returning to those roots, on behalf of my employer.
The short story is that my employer, after dragging feet and pushing back, have realized that there is a need to provide online training for the products we create. To date, our training is on a published schedule, and either occurs in a physical training facility, or online. This does not work well in a world economy, where time zones differ, languages vary, and schedules don’t always align. A year and a half ago, I presented a basic proposal on moving to a self-paced modular training curriculum that would allow trainees to proceed at their own pace, on their own time.
Sometimes things just come together.
A week ago, during a routine call with the folks at MicroTek, the company we use for facilities-based training, I learned that one of their offerings was “self-paced training.” This is the exact phrase used by one of our VPs who struggles to provide training to his customers on the other side of the planet. As a result, we set up a call and saw a presentation, and all the pieces began to click. The solution presented not only addressed a number of shortcomings we have in our training, but also was a money-saver! Who couldn’t like that?
Key to this training is Markdown. Simply put, Markdown is a text-to-HTML tool. HTML itself isn’t so difficult, but it has evolved, and now includes Cascading Style Sheets, inline-code, server-side-includes, and more. Getting all the pieces of an HTML project in place is now as complex as writing other software code. Markdown allows a web designer to write plain English text, adding some basic syntax rules, and the HTML is generated as output.
What even better, is that there are a number of Markdown editors available that show you the output as you type! I’ve tried a number of (miserable) Windows products, but there’s a marvelous open source Mac project called MacDown.
In less than half a day, I “converted” three PowerPoint slides into HTML documents, and created a few fresh ones from scratch. It’s that easy to do!
MicroTek’s implementation adds some features (“extensions”) that make for things like pages, alerts, interactive questions, knowledge boxes, and more. Coupled with user tracking, this gives full visibility into how trainees interact with the program, whether they answer questions correctly, and so on.
I’ve now run some numbers and when I’ve mentioned this to others (including the EVP), there’s a lot of interest. I’m going to formalize another proposal, including costs, time to implement, resource usage, and more. I admit, I’m pretty charged up about this!
And I’m back learning (or re-learning) web technologies!