I saw this comment on Twitter:

@urbie: Flashback.. taking a text-based CBT. Owie.

I couldn’t resist retweeting…nor adding my own comment:

@dave_ferguson: RT @urbie: Flashback.. taking a text-based CBT. Owie. // Me: yeah, like going to college at the ATM screen.

This led to a side conversation with Simon Bostock about the (mostly) bad old days.  I’ve written thousands of lines of text-based CBT: long ago, I was in charge of computer-based training for Amtrak’s reservation system, and I consulted with Marriott when they launched MARSHA, their hotel system.

It’s hard to convey the impact of the all-text, monochrome oppression of dumb terminals, back in the early 1980s.  Amtrak’s ARROW system couldn’t (or wouldn’t) display lowercase letters, so the entire screen (25 rows, 80 columns) would be in uppercase.

(My ATM remark reveals the bias own experience; actually, I haven’t seen an all-text, graphics-free ATM in quite some time.  But a mainframe screen is falling into the same category as a dial telephone or a ditto machine.)

Back then, CBT could be downright horrible. So is a good deal of contemporary digital learning; it’s just horrible in newer, flashier, noisier ways.

I recalled, during my conversation with Simon, that at the time I’d taken great pride in the training we created at Amtrak.  The reason for the pride?  We made good use of the tool.  It was what we had to work with, and a better tool  for the situation than any other realistic option.

Every technology has its advantages and its drawbacks.  If you work in a group setting, let alone an organizational one, sometimes you choose to live with the givens.  So, at Amtrak: we had over 2,000 people in over 125 locations who needed to learn to use a new reservation system, different from the one about half of them had seen before.  And we wanted the training to work for new employees–say, 400 or 500 per year–so we didn’t want to keep saying “in the old system…”

So what did we do?  This kind of thing:

• Started with a goal in mind. Specifically, we wanted to teach people how to make reservations and issue tickets using the new system.  Folderol about what kind of mainframe we had or what company made the previous system was, well, folderol.
• Strenuously avoided on-screen lectures. We worked hard to avoid over-explaining.  A frequent pattern: simple example, you-do-it problem, clear feedback for varied answers, then extension to more cases.
• “Individualized” by chunking. Most people would learn on the job, so we build courses to take less than 20 minutes.  Clear topics (“how to report train time”) made it easy for someone to decide whether to take a given course.
• Built a practice system. Probably the single most useful thing we did was to create (in collaboration with the Train Operations department) a set of “training trains.”  Any user of the Amtrak system could use a special ID to work with these in any way he wanted–make reservations, change reservations, even issue tickets (nonvalid ones–they wouldn’t print).  This allowed people to apply the general procedures from the formal CBT to the kinds of problems they encountered on the job.

Note that the training trains were not part of the CBT.  One person on my team worked with Train Ops and essentially cloned actual trains.  You had to use the training-train ID to get to them, and with that ID, you couldn’t work with actual reservations.  So it provided robust practice (you were using all the capabilities of the system) while protecting you from serious consequences for mistakes (you couldn’t cancel someone’s actual trip).

Our success was a result of combining the new tool with the best of what we knew about learning in the workplace.  All of this reminded me, as Charles Aznavour does in a different setting, that at times in the past, people weren’t wrong.

Public domain image of a dumb-terminal screen by SamuraiClinton, from WikiMedia Commons.