However, my main complaint is the problem with sound and bandwidth on the Internet. I am in the US, with a broadband connection, but during peak hours (4pm) the PP presentation was still annoyingly slow. I have had a very frustrating time with streaming audio on my computer, which is admittedly rather old. I cannot get Real player to work at all, but I can listen to some audio pieces - on the other hand, at home, Real player works well, but some others do not.

I consider myself a very average internet user, with no great computer skills, but it seems to me that online learning will not take off until this whole issue is tackled. I understand that the Adobe Acrobat format is the universally accepted standard for document transmission and this works well - surely we need something analogous for sound and/or multimedia files?