So working at Sheffield Hallam University was a great place, with many great benefits. Top of the list was the ability of any member of staff to join an under subscribed course (Masters, PhD, modules) for completely free!
My boss at the time was the principle lecturer for the MSc e-learning and multimedia course. The course was more teaching pedagogy course; evaluating how teaching could be improved using online resources, rather than a technical here's how to build an e-learning site.
But for our Dissertation we were encouraged to pick a topic that was of interest to you. What could be more bonkers than teaching people how to snowboard online?
Of course you can never replace the kinetics of the sport, however my plan was to reinforce various parts of the teaching process online.
A more modern way of:
"Tell them what you are going to teach them, teach them, and then tell them what you have taught them."
In this way, students could find out what was expected of them, and see a good set of demonstrations before the lesson. Then after they could compare their own attempts with that of the demonstration given to them.
The society the sbmatrix.com was born out of the need to test these ideas out for real. I started to invite some colleagues from work to have some lessons, and news travelled quickly. At times we were teaching groups of 20 people split over 3/ 4 instructors using all parts of the slope from the nursery to the fun park
It was a great success, I personally taught over 40 people how to snowboard, the majority of which still go on holidays to this day. The society itself had two main holidays and we were lucky enough even to have 1 marriage, 2 children and 1 engagement to result from chance encounters on the slope.