Question:
This is an issue we face daily. In Toolbook we create a lot of graphic intensive pages for the web. Clients continually complain to us that they never know if all the graphics on the page have loaded before the commence a question. Currently what we do is we use a loadpage command in AE and tell it to display the message PLEASE WAIT---Loading All Page Components - until all objects are visible on the page. This is very time consuming for each page, but it does sort of work. Clients tell us all the time that with Flash the message indicates "Please Wait - loading ----" so you know that the graphics are loading. In Toolbook when you have a book with lots of pages, clients tend to not want to wait, especially those who are on phonelines and have no high speed, which is most. Does anyone have any other ideas on how to place a timer or such (Perhaps Graphic Timer) on each page, to advise the user that all objects are not yet loaded or how much time is left before all objects are loaded?
Answer:
we have spent quite a bit of time on grappling with bandwidth limitations while at the same time trying to provide learners with a media-rich learning experience. I could go on and on about the research behind adult learning principles and why WE have to adapt to their needs and why forcing them to adapt to our instructional delivery limitations is a recipe for failure. The bottom line is that if we can't meet the needs of learners we will lose them.
When my organization (which provides off-the-shelf training for manufacturing organizations) moved to CBT we set some guidelines that our customers told us they could tolerate and that we felt we could achieve with the current limitations of compression technology. The first guideline was that we had to develop for the lowest common denominator which in our world is 28.8 dial-up connection. Second was that given that limitation, no page could take longer than 5 seconds to download. Our programs contain both audio and graphics so you can imagine the challenge we faced. We did decide that we could have various levels of media available in our programs so our first step was to strip out the audio for slow internet connections, use audio text instead and just focus on the graphics. I can send you my download calculator or you can use one of the calculators mentioned on the list today (one of them that I tried works really well and the download times match up exactly with the calculator that I have in excel).
A five second download time meant that we could have no more than 18KB of graphics on any one page. We developed ways to make graphics really small, and to reuse graphics whenever possible. By adding a copy of all of the graphics to a preload page at the beginning of the unit the learner can invest a few minutes up front to assure smooth sailing through the training. I have also found that for whatever reason, preloading all of the graphics on one page does not seem to take as long as my calculator would have me think it would??? We have now also added a preload function to our audio. By using Mp3 files and compressing them to 16kbps we are able to have a relatively quick download that enables learners to access audio from their harddrive instead of the internet if they are on a slow connection. So far our testing has proven successful and learners have reported that they are happy with the results; regardless of their connection speed, they get a media-rich learning experience without wasted time or excessive delays. By the way, our books are typically 150 to 250 pages with quizzes included.
