I’ve been working hard on Gateway Blogging (even changing my blog consulting services business around in a way that frees up time for me to write). All the while, I’ve been thinking about the best way to present the material. There are so many possibilities: ebooks, interactive learning environments, video, audio…
Or all of the above!
It’s a tough call. I have to think about what are the real goals with Gateway Blogging, and what are the real needs of those who will benefit from the program?
To a business person, having downloadable, printable, and portable media is key. You’ve got to be able to take it with you. You’ve got to be able to take it in the media of your choice, such as audio for your music player when you’re on the go or multitasking in the office.
Thoughts like these are moving me away from a central learning environment and towards ebooks, audio, and video. All of these media are highly portable and do not require an internet connection to be of use once acquired.
A physical book can be hundreds of pages and still be perfectly manageable, but an ebook cannot. An ebook becomes a pain in the butt after about a hundred pages. Large ebooks are unwieldy to navigate, download, and they’re certainly too big to print.
So we’re looking at several ebooks and multiple audio & video files. I might even consider a physical product: printed books and real DVDs and CDs. That would crank up the price, but the value of a physical product is in its portability and reliability. Files can take a long time to download from the web. If something happened to your computer, at least you’d still have the product–all of that knowledge wouldn’t vanish. And many people simply learn more effectively when they’re not sitting in front of a computer.
We’ll see. My mind is not completely made up, yet. Those of you who are on the alpha tester list are going to get something to test pretty darn soon!
Do you have any thoughts on the format of the course? I welcome your feedback via blog comments below or you can contact me directly.

I wrote a post on my business blog called 



