While searching for helpful small business sites around the
Web, SOHO Recommends happened upon Tutorials.com. We were
intrigued by their offer of "training on demand on your
desktop," so we decided to take the FrontPage 2000 class to
give the site a test drive.
What’s Available
This Web site offers a wide range of courses from
Programming to Office 2000. Tutorials.com allows you to choose
the courses best suited to your needs. Unlike the usual freshman
year restrictions, there are no prerequisite courses here. You
can choose to take the FrontPage 2000 Introduction course or you
can skip right to an advanced class.
Tutorials.com allows you to take each course at your own
pace. You can subscribe to each course for a month, 6 months or
even a year. The price per course varies from $9.95 to $ 419.95,
depending on the subject matter and the length of your
subscription. Some of the more expensive choices are just
bundles of related courses. You get a chance to kick the tires
before you buy: Each course has a free demonstration so you can
preview the technique Tutorials.com uses to teach you.
Our Experience
Are you often distracted in class? To help keep things
interesting, each course uses a multi media presentation to
teach you and hold your attention. If the phone rings, you can
pause the presentation and resume the class without missing a
beat. To customize your learning experience, you can skip or
repeat a topic by clicking on a button at any time. You can even
stop the class completely and exit your computer. When you
return to the site, you can pick up right where you left off by
using the convenient table of contents. This feature is great
for busy individuals, like small-office/home-office workers, who
cannot find time to attend continuing education courses at the
local community college.
Each course features a search engine to help you find a
specific topic within that course. For example, when you finish
the FrontPage course and you are having trouble with that one
hover button that just won’t work the way you want it to, just
go to the search engine and enter in "hover button".
You’ll zoom back to the lecture over hover buttons. You can
also revisit topic areas by selecting them from the table of
contents or the index.
You take a test before the course to help you evaluate how
much you already know and what you need to learn. If you have
already mastered a chapter of the course and you do not wish to
review that material, you can "test out" of it at the
exit exam. When you have completed the course and passed the
exit test, you can then print out a certificate of completion.
The Bottom Line
We found this site to be very useful and a great bargain.
The layout of the site is very user-friendly. Our reviewer did
not have to dig through the site to find her tutorials or to
check her progress. The verdict: Our tester liked this site so
much that she is planning on taking another course.
Return to top
