Avalanche Institute - Avalanche Course FAQs
Yes and Yes. Online education has come a long way. Unfortunately there are still too many courses out there, including some in academia, which consider online education to be a matter of dumping notes onto the web. The idea of developing a course program like this was formulated a long time ago, but was delayed until recently because the tools were not available or adequate. Some of these tools are listed in the answer to the next question.
Using the Dokeos open source software allows students to communicate in numerous ways, with each other as well as the instructor(s). There are quizzes which are scored online immediately, there are quizzes which are submitted for review and comments using a "dropbox", there are forums built into most modules as one of the basic tools, and there is a message system for communication between anyone currently logged in. The dropbox, messaging, and forums can be used between students, not just with instructors. When something is submitted via the dropbox the recipient can attach comments that the originator can then read. When a student logs into the Avalanche Institute it shows a list of modules they are enrolled in, and next to each one there are icons for any tools with items that are new since the last login. (New forum posts, new links, new dropbox communication, etc.)
Anything is possible, and there is always somebody who can prove it! However, failing a course is pretty difficult as long as the student is interested and motivated. It's rare for people taking a course by choice and paying for it out their own pocket not to be. Quizzes can be retaken if necessary until a passing score is achieved. Even when it's not necessary students often retake them to get right what they may have gotten wrong the first time. It's a bit like a Wilderness First Responder or Wilderness First Aid class. Those are hard to fail as long as a person shows up, is motivated, and participates. (But to go back to the first sentence, some people have indeed managed to somehow fail one of these!)
What is possible is to fail to complete a course or module. This was a problem to some extent when it was under development. Not all the content was available and students would stop for a while. (However, in many cases they stopped at a point where some progress was still possible.) Once they stopped it was difficult to get going again. Now that we are out of the development/pilot phase there is less excuse for this. It's up to you to keep moving through the material - whether you blast through large chunks at a time on a weekend or a slow day at work or whether you do a little bit each day before or after work. (Both of these approaches have been successful for different people.)
We now have email reminder lists that students can opt into, either weekly or daily. By subscribing to one of these you will receive regular reminders to keep working on your course so that you won't forget about when other things come up.
The Dokeos software our courses use is supported on Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. Other browsers should work but are not officially supported. Safari is supposed to present some problems but we have had students use it for at least parts of the course without trouble. The two supported browsers are available for both PC and Mac so either system is ok. (Unix/Linux should be possible also, but anyone using those is probably technically skilled enough not to need support for their platform.) Modules use java or javascript for some things, including quizzes. This should not be a problem if all of the security settings on your browser are set at the default level.
You may need to save graphics to your own computer, mark them up, and submit them using the dropbox in a few cases. Files can be saved locally in Windows with a right-click of the mouse, and it shouldn't be any harder on a Mac. We did have one student so far who simply had too much trouble with these basics and quickly dropped out, nobody else has. To mark up items like graphics you need some basic editing program. Almost any will do - windows Paint, Fireworks, Photoshop, the software that came with a camera or something, etc.
In a nutshell, anyone who uses a computer on the internet on even a semi-regular basis shouldn't encounter any technical problems.
We will do our best to help you through any problems you encounter. Problems that appear to be on the server end rather than your end will be quickly investigated, although we are not aware of any at this time. Our 2007-08 pilot program ran smoothly for the most part.
If you really don't have the computer literacy to continue in the course we will refund the course fee minus the cost of any modules successfully completed. We would expect such a problem to become clear before completing many modules, if any at all. In 2007-08 we did offer one woman a refund when she had problems with such things as saving a graphic to her own desktop. (She also encountered some problems that were fixed during the pilot program. Others encountered these problems as well but only the one person found them to be all that major.)
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