EPA's Office of Water offers training on compliance with the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) to the owners and operators of about 100,000 public and private water distribution systems in this country. These range from complex delivery systems that serve millions of customers in metropolitan areas to rural delivery systems that draw from a local well to serve 20 customers.

The demand for training in the Office of Water, related to the SDWA, was enormous - in terms of time, staff, and travel. So in 2000, the Office brought PPC on board to develop an animated, interactive online training course for the Drinking Water Academy to highlight the best practices related to protecting watersheds and groundwater sources. This knowledge is the starting point for keeping drinking water safe throughout the country.

PPC used its experience to create something more dynamic than the 150-slide, click-through PowerPoint presentation that the client had originally envisioned transferring to the Web. PPC reduced the number of frames to 48, with no loss of content, by using animation rather than text to emphasize key concepts. This scheme offers learning at two levels: all the text that the Office of Water used in its traditional training program is for more in-depth study while the fundamental concepts are presented visually to enhance the stimulation of the online presentation. Entertainment value must always be considered in online training as it keeps the viewers "turning the pages" and learning.

The users have responded very favorably, citing the quality of the content and the flexibility of the learning experience. They study at their own pace on their own time and return to the materials again and again. New staff or new operators can quickly get up to speed on critical issues related to groundwater protection. And, because this is a Macromedia Flash Application, the course can be downloaded to a hard drive or burned to a CD; or the full text can be printed out and saved.

The savings in time, staff, and travel has paid for this program over and over again.