O’Reilly (the premiere IT publishing house) now offers hands-on software training through a partnership with Useractive which, in turn, has a partnership with the University of Illinois. What’s interesting about the offering is the way that it’s apparently accomplished technically and what that affords. From a user’s perspective, you use your web browser to gain access to a desktop with all the development tools installed as well as a shell that gives step-by-step instructions. You do your development (in Microsoft Visual Studio or whatever is appropriate) within the browser and then click a button to submit your work to an instructor (presumably an U of I professor or grad student).
How does this work? My best guess is that each student is getting access to a computer with all the appropriate stuff installed using some desktop sharing technology like RealVNC. All of the development tools have been installed on the remote machine, as well as the instructional shell (which, in most cases looks like it was slapped together using Visual Basic). But that wouldn’t be enough to make this venture profitable; how could they afford to have all of those machines available, as well as the staff to reset them after each student use? I suspect that remote machines are not physical boxes. Instead, they are probably virtual machines run using something like Virtual PC or VMWare. When the student is done with the lesson, the virtual machine just resets to the original image of the PC before the training started. Pretty slick.
There are companies that are trying to use this same strategy for creating training sandboxes on web-based apps where you wouldn’t want learners to change data in the production environment (e.g., a trading system or a CRM application). This strikes me as a lot more complicated to get right than a desktop setup like O’Reilly has, but I’m keeping an open mind about it. In the meantime, this looks like a strategy that mid-sized to large organizations could replicate internally for desktop apps, and it also looks like it may be a winner for alliances between companies like Useractive and schools like U of I.
