MMC was the First CIM Study Centre to Break the Technology and Make Online Learning Happen Back in 2000
As the first CIM study centre in the world to implement online learning in 2001, MMC broke the technology barrier
Surfing the web before the millennium
To many people at the turn of the millennium, this beautiful sound signalled freedom, the gateway to a whole new world of entertainment and exploration! In the days before connection via broadband became widely available, the sound of a 56k internet dial-up connection using a landline and modem was music to the ears of all who graced a computer.
Well, almost all.
Imran Farooq from Manchester thought he might actually throw the damn thing out of the window if he had to shout ‘get off the phone, I’m trying to use the internet!’ one more time…
Surely he thought, approaching the dawn of the 21st century, it should be possible for households to conduct phonecalls and use the computer at the same time?
He clicked to open a webpage and settled in for the long wait. Browsing the web was painstakingly slow, you were lucky to get speeds of 10mb to 50mb per second.
The website loaded, finally. Bland text, pixelated images and non-existant animations. What did it mean he ‘needed to update his adobe flash player?!’, he could have sworn he’d done that last week!
It can be easy to forget that in the 1990’s, the internet was in its infancy, still learning to walk.
Most websites boasted an extremely simplistic user interface and design and were laid out something like a page from a newspaper, using similar fonts which makes sense when you consider that website builders had little else to base their new creations on at the time.
It hardly seems conceivable now, but in the late 1990’s people were asking ‘what’s a google?’ as the search engine company, formed in 1998 by a couple of Stanford students, had only recently launched its ‘Google Beta’ web browser. Bear in mind that at the time you usually had to acquire a browser via a disk to insert into your computer (as they were too large to download from the web itself) and it’s amazing to think how far we’ve come!
With the 1999 book ‘The Rough Guide to the Internet’, opening with the words “Okay, what’s this Internet good for?” one could at the time, be forgiven for questioning whether this ‘internet business’ would ever take off!
Despite this, there were those who saw the infinite possibilities of the world wide web.
The big questions
Beginning his career as a Business and Marketing graduate at a time when TV and magazine advertising was still the norm, Imran saw the potential of the world wide web. This technology could help educate marketers in their job by providing new avenues of connection with customers and most importantly, could help teach them the skills they needed to succeed in their role and navigate the evolving landscape, by delivering courses from afar.
Young, ambitious and passionate about expanding opportunities for marketers and business entrepreneurs, Imran was asking some big questions. What if you could use the internet to stream top quality content (audio/video) for learners from the comfort of their own home? What if you could deliver learning in a variety of formats? What if you could harness the internet to create a flexible learning alternative for working people that fit around their job?
Seems fairly obvious right? But take a second to re-evalute those ideas spinning round your head! Back then there was no zoom, no microsoft teams, no youtube or vimeo. There was no such thing as a moodle or a student portal.
In order to truely appreciate the enormity of the challenge, let’s take a trip back to the days of brick phones and cargo pants, and re-visit online learning as it was in the late 1990’s