Partner™ Courses
Learn more about Advantage™ CoursesCompare Advantage and Partner Course Features
A Partner course is simply any course that is not authored on the Mastery Advantage™ platform. The instructional design among Partner products will vary and the playback experience will not benefit from lesson caching which is only available in Advantage courses. These differences are not necessarily negatives. Nor are they always relevant given your particular needs. You must examine each Partner course and make your own assessment of whether its instructional design and media playback characteristics meet your needs.
A well designed Partner course can match many of the platform features of an Advantage course. It depends on the course producer’s standards and capabilities. To help with your assessment, we identify the producers of our Partner courses on course product pages.
Instructional Design
The instructional design characteristics of a Partner course varies among interactive producers and will also vary according to the audience needs and the intended use of the product. Mastery Technologies is often the interactive producer on joint projects with video producer partners.
The instructional design models used by Partner courses generally fall within two categories:
- Video On Demand
- Interactive
Video On Demand (“VOD”) is a relatively new category of training. VOD courses are usually composed of a single video which contains the entire instructional presentation of the course. There are generally no interactions between the user and the presentation except for a control bar with rudimentary functions. Some VOD courses provide additional resources such as downloadable workbooks and job aids. Some may also feature a topical index.
Interactive implementations among Partner courses will range from the very basic to the very elaborate and immersive interactions. Generally an interactive content producer will adopt an instructional design model and apply it to all or most of their courses. Course features are described or listed on course product pages.
Video Performance
Partner courses use file streaming technology for delivering video content. All Partner courses use properly prepared video files and will play with a specific popular and ubiquitous player or plugin. You will achieve good video performance if your internet connection can sustain approximately 300 Kbps of available bandwidth per user for the entire learning session. Usually this is not a problem with high-speed home connections. If you are using a shared workplace connection, you should test the course with your expected number of concurrent users to determine if the bandwidth available to your users is adequate to sustain acceptable video performance. Poor video performance appears as excessive buffering delays, video and audio disruptions during playback, and loss of video control functions. If you experience these problems, you should limit your course choices to Advantage courses.
