This is certainly an excellent question. We have shied away from going web based for several reasons:
1. Yes - bandwidth is a real issue. Research into instructional effectiveness of computer based training shows that students lose interest if response time is greater than 2 seconds. Sorry... for most people, the web is not there yet - not when full audio and video are involved. It will get there, but not yet.
2. Many companies don't want employees at the factory floor level outside the company firewall, for a large variety of reasons.
3. If the information is not really dynamically changing, having to pay the incremental cost for network services doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Why not stay with the company internal network, where you can control access, costs, and bandwidth.
4. In spite of the familiarity of the browser interface to most professional people, it is still far from intuitive for new users. We try to keep the user interface very straight forward, so that non-computer users can get started quickly.
These items raised, the acceptability and retention issues have a lot more to do with the quality of the instruction than with anything that is implicitly web/non-web.
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