Book Review , A selection of new books for trainers and managers

Creating the Virtual Classroom: Distance Learning with the Internet

by Lynnette R. Porter

John Wiley & Sons, 1997

256 pages



Need a basic introduction to distance learning? Lynnette R. Porter's Creating the Virtual Classroom: Distance Learning with the Internet won't help experienced technology-based training developers create a comprehensive virtual classroom. But if you've recently been asked to take the plunge into Internet training, you may find it an extremely useful overview of the field.



Unfortunately, Porter offers few anecdotes to illustrate her points. Instead, she delivers a flurry of headings and subheadings. For example, she tells us that the "Vendors of Distance Learning Courses or Programs" are "Businesses That Need to Disperse Information In-House," "Businesses that Provide Educational or Training Services to Clients," "Governmental Units that Study and/or Provide Distance Learning," and so on. Despite including this wide range of vendors, she targets the bulk of her analysis to education, not the corporate world.



Popular literature suggests that the only way to deliver remote training is via the Web. Not so. Porter devotes a chapter to prosaic (but useful) distance learning tools, such as email, fax and voice mail. And she provides some practical ideas for funding a distance learning proposal.



But, after slogging through these chapters, I was ready for some meat in Chapter 7, "The World Wide Web in Education and Training."



Given the book's title, the chapters on the Web and on Internet video should be crucial ones, the focus of the writer's research and analysis. Chapter 7 of Creating the Virtual Classroom is filled with facts. Unfortunately, most of them are obvious, out-of-date or wrong. Besides wasting our time defining words like hypertext, she tells us to chunk our information and make sure we select materials for the Web site before putting them up. There are a few good lists of do's and don?ts that may help the neophyte, but experienced Internet designers won't find much.



Creating the Virtual Classroom presents all of the basic concepts and issues. In fact, it's really more of a textbook than a resource book. Heartier appetites, however, will be left unsatisfied. If using the Internet to deliver training is still just a twinkle in your managerial eye, this book offers a good introduction. If, on the other hand, you're about to build a Web-based classroom, you'd be better off skipping this one. The wooden prose is barely tolerable, and this topic deserves better treatment.



Aaron Bennett is a freelance writer and the TK of the Academic Computing Center at Stonehill College in Stonehill, Mass.



Full text COPYRIGHT Bill Communications Inc. 1998