That Bloated CBT Feeling
None of us likes feeling bloated.
Whether it’s after a big Thanksgiving dinner or an undisciplined evening at an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet… that bloated feeling is our body’s way of telling us we simply ate too much…and it’s uncomfortable.
Bloating can also affect and impair your CBTs.
Now, what does a “bloated CBT” look like? It’s a course where care has not been taken to keep the file size as small as possible. Where the designer has used inefficient methods to build their course when better, more optimized, approaches could have been chosen.
Bloating affects small CBTs as well as larger courses, and there are consequences for the bloat:
- Poor performance: eLearning courses, whether taken at work or in the home, are always going to be limited by connection speed or bandwidth (and usually both). You simply can’t force a fire-hydrant of water down a plastic sippy straw. Even in the best environment, larger courses will take longer to download than smaller courses, so keeping your courses as streamlined as possible will result in better overall performance and end-user experiences.
- Storage needs: As online learning increasingly begins to look and act more like high-end video games, file sizes are beginning to increase astronomically. You need someplace to put all that data, and hard drives and servers can quickly fill up.
The fact is, CBT bloating is incredibly common (both for the seasoned designer and the newbie) and is easy to fix… given just *a little* discipline.
So, how do we bring relief to the CBT bloating problem? Well, that’s something we’re gonna cover in the next series of postings.
