Building Area Measurement LLC

The BOMA Standard eSeminar

The BOMA online seminar may be your best bet for learning the BOMA Standard Method for Measuring Floor Area in Office Buildings (ANSI/BOMA Z65.1-1996) Before jumping to that site and committing your time and $150, you might want to read the following review, which is an expanded version of the one that was published in BOMA.ORG and the AIA Architect.

Return to BOMA Standard page

A Review of the BOMA Standard eSeminar

Online training is one of the hottest new commodities in our universities. I just finished taking three online courses through a local community college. I enjoyed them so much that I was curious to find out about the new online class for the BOMA Standard for Floor Area Measurement. I am pleased to report that this seminar does an excellent job of covering its subject matter in an entertaining way, and even provides some unexpected extras. However, there are some pitfalls that they don’t warn you about.

Bill Partridge of BOMA Calgary, who has taught the subject many times, produced the seminar. With a certificate in adult education, Bill is among the most qualified people you’ll find to produce this seminar. You do not have to be a BOMA member to take the course. Anyone with a credit card and the right technology on their desktop can do it.

You start the seminar by firing up the browser on your computer and typing in the URL www.ebridge.tv/boma/measurement/ or by following a link that you can find on your local BOMA chapter Internet site or on the BOMA International site. On the first page, there is a fun pre-test that you can take that may convince you of your ignorance and your need to spend three hours of your time to understand this important Standard. Even if you score the maximum 30 points on the pre-test, you will probably find the course worthwhile and benefit from the many extras that are offered.

Also on the first page is a 5-minute overview. I strongly recommend that you look at it. If it takes your computer 10 or 15 minutes to display this short Windows Media Player video, or if you can’t see the video part at all, you may have to find another computer with a faster Internet connection that also allows video feeds and has the required software. If you can’t get the overview to work, you could be wasting your money and/or time trying to take the course.

Clicking “Start e-Seminar Now” takes you through the registration process. After registering and selecting your access password, your first two chores are to download the course Workbook and a copy of the BOMA Standard, both of which are in Adobe Acrobat format. I love having the Standard in an electronic format that I can keep on my laptop for ready reference everywhere. I can even do an electronic search of the Standard for key terms, using the latest version of Acrobat Reader. I consider this one of the best extras in taking the course. The Workbook is excellent and the graphics are better than those in the Standard itself (hear that, BOMA International?). However, the workbook does not contain all the meat in this course, so reading it is not a substitute for taking the course.

You can take all three sections in one three-hour sitting, but most will prefer to re-visit the seminar on three separate occasions. Once you have completed a section, you cannot go back and re-take it. This can be a problem if your session is interrupted by a technology glitch, because a section, once started, can be then marked as “completed”, and you cannot re-take it. Fortunately, this problem can be rectified by a call to the iNet technical support number, but not without some time (as much as 24 hours), which can be a pain if you have traveled some distance to a library just to use a computer with a fast Internet connection.

At the end of each section, you are tested on that section’s material and you cannot advance to the next section until you achieve a passing grade. This assures that the Certificate of Completion that you receive at the end of the course will attest to your knowledge of the Standard. As you might expect, the questions are all multiple choice and you can re-take the quizzes until you get them all right. You can consult an answer key if you cannot figure out the right answer to a question.

You can also email questions to the instructors. Their responses will guide you with respect to what the Standard says (or does not say), but don’t expect them to fill I all the “gray areas” that fall between the scope of the Standard and all the weird stuff you encounter in many modern office buildings. And don’t bother asking questions about “The Modified BOMA Standard” and that sort of thing, which, doesn’t exist as far as BOMA is concerned. I had high hopes that the “Q&A” section of the seminar would provide some fresh insights, but I was disappointed to find that the Q&As were mostly the same as the “Answers to 26 Questions About the ANSI/BOMA Standard…” that has been available for downloading for years on the BOMA International web site.

One of the more valuable extras in the Workbook was the selection of sample lease clauses provided as a class exercise. Several of these clauses are representative of all too common problems that I’ve seen in lease language. I may get shot at sunrise for “practicing law without a license”, but I have to tell any of you out there who are lawyers that you must understand this measurement standard before you write a lease that cites it. The bad results produced by cribbing parts of it, or by modifying it without a full understanding of the Standard, are clearly shown in the examples.

The seminar makes full use of the latest “distance learning” technology, and give you the feeling that you could be sitting in a private lecture hall with your instructor next to a whiteboard that continuously reinforces his words with bullet lists and diagrams. Very cool! Within each section, you can pause, back up or skip ahead, so answering the phone or letting the dog out won’t cause you to miss any material. Everything that can be done has been done to make learning effective over the Internet. The only thing missing is the give-and-take between instructor and all the students, which for some is a big part of any classroom learning experience. This was no different than the other online classes I taken, but the use of multi-media made this class significantly better than those other classes. It is much more than an online textbook.

The biggest problem with the eSeminar is that it’s heavy graphic and video content requires a high-speed Internet connection – 128 kbps minimum (that’s ISDN, DSL, broadband or T-1 access). If you try it from home with your dial-up modem, even the so-called 56 k modems, which rarely reach that speed, you find the progress agonizingly slow. It may seem funny at first, but you’ll eventually tire of watching Mr. Partridge’s face paused in Quasimoto-like expressions while your computer waits for the video stream to catch up or the whiteboard to refresh. Even if you work in a company that has T-1 Internet connections, you may find yourself thwarted in taking the seminar because many network administrators block video feeds from the Internet, since they hog too much bandwidth. The “talking head”, while a nice human touch, is a major culprit and cannot be turned off by the user. I see this as the biggest flaw in the seminar.

If Internet connections prevent you from taking the seminar from your home or business, you may be able to find a computer in a cyber café or a public library that will do the job. However, be aware that the eSeminar requires current versions of both Adobe Acrobat and Windows Media Player. When I went to our local library to use a free public computer, I found that their Windows Media Player was one version too old, and it took a couple of hours and the assistance of a computer administrator to download and install the current version of the free software because of the protection features that were installed on their computers.

In summary, if your technology resources are up to the challenge and you can learn on your own, I can heartily recommend this online training opportunity. Just pay attention to the cautions above, and you will have an enjoyable learning experience.

Return to BOMA Standard page