Web is an ideal platform for offering sophisticated interactive educational or training environment. Essentially every bit of educational material offered by the CME can be put on-line, which includes their scheduled courses. Presently, CME offers a number of short tutorials on-line as well as lists and descriptions of scheduled courses. These courses can be used as a foundation to develop a full-service Web-based Investor Education Center.
In addition to text, charts and images (static content), the Web-based courses can include simulations of the complete investment process with varying degrees of interactivity. Relevant Web-related technologies are: HTML forms, CGI, Perl, Java and VRML. Level of interactivity can be tailored to user's need and experience.
At the lowest level, users can browse pre-defined course material enhanced by visualization software to display quantitative data, as well as images, sound and video clips. At this level, content and presentation is determined by the course designer.
At the highest level of interactivity, a technical futures trader, for example, might be guided through the development of a trading system on-line using the analytical tools explained in the introductory portion of the course, such as neural networks, and would be given a chance to test the system using historical and live data from CME, information sources such as news video clips and external data such as global economic indicators. The virtual trading experience could include realistic effects of slippage, comission schedules etc.
Investor Education Center can be developed without a major investment in hardware, although a separate database server would be necessary to deliver training data sets ( market data, multimedia content etc.) and a separate compute server should host analytical software modules used in the coursework. For example, a trader might be taught how to use neural networks for time series forecasting. Historical data should reside on the database server, while the neural network software should run on the compute server. Activities of these servers would be coordinated by the Center's Web server, which would formulate queries and computational tasks based on user inputs, forward them to the two back-end servers, coordinate the exchanges between them, collect computation results and deliver final HTML pages to the user's browser.
Major effort will be required for software integration and/or development of analytical software demos if the existing ones cannot be easily integrated. Major effort is also required to restructure the course content to take advantage of the interactivity of the Web.
Interactive content is essential for a successful Web presence. Besides drawing a large number of prospective clients it also offers a valuable source of information about market needs and sentiments. By carefully tailoring the content and monitoring access statistics, an organization can obtain insights into the needs of its client base which are impossible to obtain at such a low cost by any other method. For example, a very ambitious service that may be offered by CME on the Web is the Investment Analysis Resource Center, which is described below. Unlike Investor Education Center, Investment Analysis Resource Center would consume significant infrastructure and computing resources with the goal of offering sophisticated analysis and decision support for the investment public. The problem is that Web is so new that it is not possible to predict what kind of service is the Internet community willing to pay for and what is the appropriate fee schedule. A possible marketing strategy would be to introduce demos of services to be offered by the Investment Analysis Resource Center through the Investor Education Center, and then gauge user response. In addition to gathering valuable information, CME will create a pool of likely future users/clients.