To get an overall picture of Atomic Learning, Educational Pathways (EP) talked with its president; its director of content development; its higher education sales manager; and one of its customers, Owens Community College in Toledo, Ohio.

President Ron Kresha explained how the company was formed by a group of eleven people - mostly Minnesota school district technology coordinators - who found their time being consumed with providing answers to software procedure questions that came from educators within their districts. In particular, previous to launching the company, these coordinators were fielding an overabundance of questions on how to use various components of Apple’s iMovie video-editing software.

"We decided that we could decrease our work load if we just put all these answers on the web," Kresha said. "So we started capturing all these frequently asked questions and answers, and they started to spawn off more and more. So, we turned it into a product, and away we went, with our first product consisting of about 300 tutorials on iMovie.

"We initially had one full-time employee, and it kept growing from there. Now we are at 47 employees, We have sales people, content developers and an in-house accounting and marketing staff. It runs the whole gamut. It has been phenomenal and unexpected. We hit a curve, and away it went."

In addition, Karamol noted that Atomic Learning has a tracking feature that allows administrators to monitor how much the tutorials are being utilized. "Our biggest tutorial usage right now is coming from EXCEL 2003 because one of our online instructors, who is teaching a spreadsheet course, has integrated Atomic Learning directly into his course," Karamol said. "He has told me that he has gotten rave reviews on using those tutorials.

Another high usage statistic emanates from the Blackboard 6 and 7 student-oriented group of tutorials where there are more than 100 tasks portrayed. Karamol explained that Owens staff make specific recommendations to students during their orientations about which tutorials may be more pertinent to the daily tasks they are typically asked to accomplish with Blackboard for both their online courses and on-campus courses that utilize the course management system. "We suggest that students at least watch these tutorials," Karamol added.

Karamol said he was also impressed by the fact that many of the Atomic Learning tutorials have closed captioning. So, while each software task has both audio and video (screen-capturing with cursor movement) components, playable in Flash and QuickTime formats, hard-of-hearing users are better able to take advantage of these tutorials through closed captioning.

Atomic Learning’s Higher Education Sales Manager Michael Nelson pointed out another benefit these tutorials present to colleges and universities through its authorization capabilities. "With a campus license, we can authorize users via the campus IP range, so the users do not have to remember a username and password," he said. "In most cases, we can also integrate into a single sign-on portal or learning management system, so there is also no need for off-campus users to remember an additional username or password."

Greg Beck, the company’s director of content development, who was also one of the original eleven co-founders, noted how his team works hard at simulating the experience of having a colleague or highly knowledgeable software user "come down and sit next to you at your computer, grab the mouse and walk you through it (a software procedure). It is pretty much a live process."

The company statement on cost is as follows: "Atomic Learning offers both site licenses to provide unlimited access to Atomic Learning for all faculty, staff and students, starting at $1.25 per FTE, and individual licensing, starting at $79.99 annually."

Beck also explained how his content development work and the company’s growth "has been fairly constant, especially over the last couple of years. We don’t run out of work because applications are always being refreshed. This is especially true today with online applications that can change overnight. So, I do not foresee a drop in the number of things we are doing. This last year was busy and is continuing right now because of the new release of Vista and the Microsoft Office packages and the Adobe CS3 products. Just those alone add up to lots of development work."