"What we plan to do is to partner with manufacturers to develop a specialized curriculum regarding a product, and then give them a vehicle to present this to dealers," he said. "We'll also be able to do some fairly immediate evaluation for the manufacturer, to point out areas they may not be addressing fully enough, and they can quickly make adjustments to address the situation. The end result will be a better understanding, out of the gate, of all key parameters of a new product."

Right now, the basic audio course runs 12 weeks, with eight required units of study. Each week, Chuck enters the course room and posts a unit assignment, which includes required reading of a book and/or a CD-ROM chapter. He also posts 12-24 questions about the unit which must be correctly answered and submitted, in addition to 3-4 additional questions to be answered and discussed by all class members on a forum.

The format is extremely flexible; students falling behind have the luxury of making up coursework at any point during the 12-week period. And the work can be done at any time, day or night, whatever works best for a particular student’s schedule.

The final requirement is a paper explaining what the student has learned, re-learned and ways the course has helped. This also generates ideas to enhance the curriculum in the future to make the course even more effective.

"Most comments are positive, and students are indeed learning essential information in this format," he said. "Of course, we can always improve, in addition to expanding the scope of who we're able to serve."

Our discussion came to a close as we shared a mutual belief that manufacturers are doing a pretty consistent job of turning out quality equipment. More often than not, the weakest link in the system chain can now be directly identified as the operator, or a poorly assembled system, or a flawed system design.

"Outside of some obvious junk, there’s not much bad gear out there," Chuck concluded. "I've really discovered this in the past year, as I've stepped away from the day-to-day of designing and selling systems. The gear is almost all good.

"What we're seeing is that everything's pointing to the Internet - networking, streaming audio, streaming video - so we must design systems to take that into consideration. At the same time, the Internet is also helping us with this most vital issue of education. It can be a powerful tool in dramatically improving that weakest link in the chain, and we're poised to utilize it to the fullest benefit."