Web gets classier with CCT courses

Computer-skills school takes its offerings online

J. Michael Ray has heard the knock: Web-based education doesn’t match muscle with the real, live thing.

That is the mantra of skeptical education experts worldwide as they watch a recent wave of curiosity carry everyone from graduate-school research coordinators to elementary-school tutors onto the Internet in search of a conduit between school and home.

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Ray, the president and co-founder of Fort Collins-based Colorado Computer Training Ltd., has listened to the doubters, but he’s not buying their rhetoric. And last month, in the midst of a national storm of technology turmoil, Ray upgraded his 15-year-old business, uploading its slate of software training offerings onto the Web at www.cct-nt.com.

The move, which enables Ray to cut the price of his class offerings by more than 80 percent from their brick-and-mortar counterparts, has been more than a year in the planning.

Tying bolstered interactivity on the Web with a firm footing in traditional education, Ray said, the decision was “an obvious yes, a market-responsive move.” While Ray’s offering is fairly unique locally, he joins a growing mass of similar services online, all of whom are jostling for position in a global market of online computer-skills learners.

“With my background, if I’m going to use the Internet I’m going to use it for education,” he said. “The Internet opens a big market for us.”

That market is just beginning to show results for CCT. Fewer than 25 students are currently enrolled in online courses. But Ray isn’t worried. The company’s market maneuvering is just getting under way and its classroom-based instruction is still carrying the load.

The gentle transition is important, he said, because, despite his emphatic support of Web-based instruction, it’s in the classroom where Ray got his start and where his loyalties still lie.

“I’m a big proponent of instructor-led instruction,” he said. “Direct interaction is very important for learning.”

Ray speaks from experience. The Indiana native comes from a vocational/technical education background, working a stint as a professor at Colorado State University. He brought that experience into the computer world in the mid-1980s, training new hires at Hewlett-Packard Co., Kodak and Larimer County to work with the now-archaic MS-DOS system.

Over the years technology changed and so did equipment costs and space requirements, combining to drive tuition costs steadily upward: An instructor-taught Office 2000 course now totes a price tag of $1,638.60.

Meet the Internet. That same Office 2000 course is now available on CCT’s Web site for $199.95, less than 10 percent of the original price. While Ray admits “there is a trade off” between cost and effectiveness, he insists that the interactive atmosphere now available is an effective venue for learning. Many experts agree, lauding Web-based education for its tendency to convert passive student observers into self-directed learners.

The conversion isn’t a natural one for the educator or the end user, though. And the viability of a program like CCTs seems to lie in the flexibility and adaptability of its parts. CCT incorporates a multimedia presentation, complete with audio instruction, to draw from a traditional platform and presents a custom-tailored selection of course information, which relies on the user to determine level and pace and go beyond classroom limitation.

In a word, “personalization” is key online, Ray said.

In the absence of a professor, the online student can now sculpt his or her own instructor from pieces of applicable training software and knowledge of his or her own capabilities. Already know how to graph in Excel? Take a test to prove it and then start at a higher level. Having trouble figuring out footnotes? Take that section of the course again as many times as needed.

Each section of the course can be customized by the learner, creating a flexible platform that may be “better for some students,´ said Zachary Gains, a recent CSU graduate who is one of the online program’s first users. “You can learn what you want when you want. If you’re the type of learner that can be motivated, it’s almost better than the classroom course.”

Finding the right type of learner can be difficult, Ray said. But, by targeting the courses toward corporations he hopes to hone in on the demands of specific employee specifications.

“The program is topic-based,” he said. “If a company has a clerical position they can choose from all our topics to determine what that person needs to know. Then that business can do specialized training.”

In addition, businesses can create streamlined tests, picking pieces from more than 1,200 topics to gauge the skills of potential employees.

Adaptability is the future of CCT. But unlike many of its online competitors, this dot-com has a past, and that may be its most crucial asset. In the increasingly chaotic online commons, CCT may be able to hold its footing because it has feet, Ray said.

The existing classroom foundation provides support and established corporate links from which to build. To customers it seems to be an advantage because, “I can call and get help with anything,” Gains said, “and I know there are people working behind the site.”