Travel training on net

By Adam Gifford

THE New Zealand School of Travel and Tourism today unveils an internet training programme it has developed for STA Travel Australia.

The school beat a number of Australian universities for the contract to develop a "virtual campus."

Founder and managing director Pam Pattison says the school was approached by STA Travel because of the work it had done in industry-based training, and its placement rate for students at its campuses in Auckland and Christchurch of more than 80 per cent.

NZSTT works closely with industry, bringing in tutors from travel companies and airlines, who also provide curriculum input into its Qualifications Authority-approved courses.

"STA Travel is pursuing internet learning because it is targeting a new range of students who are older, well travelled and internet comfortable," Pam Pattison says.

"It can attract change-of-career people who are looking for the option to train at times convenient to them while they still have full-time jobs."

STA Travel global campus will be a virtual school with no buildings - just teachers, tutors and students.

STA Travel will require existing staff and all job applicants here and across the Tasman to complete relevant modules.

Pam Pattison says the shift of significant parts of the travel business to the internet has forced the industry to adopt new skills and technologies.

"The new training system has global potential as travel qualifications become internationally standardised," she says.

The course material includes the Australian Federal Travel Association qualification as well as material developed jointly by STA and NZSTT. It is developed on the Collaborative Classroom version of the FirstClass Server from Ontario-based SoftArc, which has been tailored for education use with conference and collaboration areas, message-history tracking and real-time chat.

Teachers can control subconferences and administrators can limit web access and add third-party extensions for self-guided tutorials and automatic administration of tests.

Scott Welch, who along with two other engineers from Northern Telecom (Nortel Networks) founded SoftArc in 1989, is in New Zealand to help launch the site and look at other education projects.

FirstClass is number four in the groupware market behind Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes and Novell GroupWise, and is known for its reliability and ease of management.

In Scandinavia, its share of the market is bigger than Lotus and Microsoft combined.

New Zealand distributor Michael Middlemiss, who helped develop the site, says FirstClass is easy to customise and fast to develop in. Site development started in June.

"It's easy to use, it has good functionality and power, and low bandwidth requirement," he says.

"That's important for this project, because many of the students will be in outback Australia at the end of 9.6kb modem connections. It can also run on older hardware."

FirstClass is used in some New Zealand education sites as well as by the New Zealand College of General Practitioners and consulting firm KPMG worldwide, where it is called Knowledge Base.

During his week in New Zealand, Mr Welch will deliver a keynote speech at the annual Polytechnic IT Conference in Queenstown.