CourseWriter CBT and Multimedia System

CourseWriter - CBT and Multimedia the easy way

If you want to create your own interactive Computer-based Training courses or multimedia presentations for the Windows platform, CourseWriter provides the tools you need.

CourseWriter is ideal for translating your subject knowledge and training expertise into CBT, and delivering that training to your students. CourseWriter allows trainers and subject experts to create, deliver and manage training courses quickly and simply without reference to expensive programming expertise.

We developed the CourseWriter system so that we could create industrial-strength distributed training courses for our clients. Now you can use the same tools for your own projects. You can create courses to cover almost any topic, meet many of your training needs and increase the effectiveness of your training, while reducing costs.

CourseWriter runs on industry-standard Windows PCs (95 and NT 4 upwards). It is network compatible and works equally well in stand-alone mode on a single PC or across a network.

The CourseWriter System

CourseWriter Developer contains everything you need to create and deliver CBT courses. Developer includes:

• Author - a powerful, easy to use CBT Authoring System
  
  
• Presenter - a flexible Student Presentation System which can be used with or without a database.

CourseWriter Manager is an optional Student and Course Management System that works with the CourseWriter database. Manager allows you to control, record and report student and course statistics. Manager comprises:

• Administrator - the CourseWriter database interface program that lets you administer the learning environment and track student progress.
  
  
• Student Registration - a program used by students that lets you track their location and activity in real-time.
  
  
• Monitor - a program that displays system status and monitors student activity. Broadcasts exception messages to alert you to any problems (requires Windows NT).

We'll show you how

Training. Courses are available to help you get the best out of any aspect of the CourseWriter system.

Support. CourseWriter support services - how to get automatic software upgrades and how to report any problem you might find.

Free Advice. Tell us what you want CourseWriter to do for you and we'll show you how to achieve it. Advice on ways and means, and help with configuration is always free for prospective and established customers. See Contact Information for details of how you can get in touch with us.

It's So Easy...

Example 1. Let's assume that you need to train 150 of your staff in "How to Get a Round Tuit". The staff are located at offices all over the world.

You could bring them in, ten at a time, to your training centre. You could pay their costs (travel, hotel, food etc.) and allocate trainers to teach them and classrooms to teach them in.

Or, you could do it the CourseWriter way:

1. Obtain CourseWriter Developer.
2. Use Author to create your "How to Get a Round Tuit" lesson.
3. Your offices are not networked so you decide to distribute the training on CD-ROM. Use Author's Create Lesson Disk facility to prepare the finished Lesson (as a CD-ROM image) for installation on your students' systems.
4. You do not need a record of student performance so you choose the non-database version of Presenter.
5. Make as many copies of the combined Presenter and Lesson installation CD-ROM disk as you need.
6. Distribute copies of the CD-ROM to your students, along with suitable instructions for installing and running the lesson.

This example could equally be applied to familiarising sales staff with new products or giving interactive product presentations to your prospective customers, or any other training or multimedia application.

The Cost? Well, you will have paid £450 (pounds sterling) for CourseWriter Developer (Author and Presenter¹). You need to add your production and distribution costs but you will still have an extremely cost-effective training course. The more lessons you develop, the more cost-effective they become.

¹ NB Your Presenter licence allows you to distribute Presenter free of charge throughout your own organisation. See Prices for more information.

Example 2. Same staff, same lesson but let's assume that this time you need to measure how much the students have learned during the course.

Using traditional methods, the trainers would have to administer a quiz before and after the course. Then they would have to mark the quizzes and produce reports.

Or, using CourseWriter you could:

1. Obtain CourseWriter Developer and the single-lesson version of Manager.
2. Use Author to create your "How to Get a Round Tuit" lesson including the quizzes.
3. Your offices are not networked so you decide to distribute the training on CD-ROM. Use Author's Create Lesson Disk facility to prepare the finished Lesson (as a CD-ROM image) for installation on your students' systems.
4. You need the quiz results recorded so you choose the database-enabled version of Presenter.
5. Make as many copies of the combined Presenter and Lesson installation CD-ROM disk as you need.
6. Distribute copies of the CD-ROM to your students, along with suitable instructions for installing and running the lesson.
7. Your offices have e-mail facilities so you decide to ask the students to e-mail the database back to you when they have finished the lesson.
8. You import the data from the e-mailed databases into your central CourseWriter database and run your reports.

Example 3. You have an open learning environment where students can move from classroom to classroom at will. There is a mixture of CBT, traditional classroom teaching and even some practical exercises.

You want to develop some CBT in-house and have some developed for you. You need to track where students are - and alert somebody if they go missing. You need to know how much time the students spend in each activity. You want to provide all the CBT course material on a central server so that all the students share one easily updateable copy. You need to control the order in which CBT lessons are made available to the students so that they cannot start the next lesson until they have finished (and passed) their current lesson. You want to ensure that only authorised students are allowed into the system. And you want the whole thing automated with a minimum of human intervention.

Can CourseWriter provide the underlying system for all this? Oh yes, and more besides. This is actually a simplified description of the learning environment used by one of our customers.

If you do not have the time or resources to develop your own CBT, we provide a complete development service.

If you want to deliver your training over the Internet/Web/Intranet, we offer a Web-based training development service.

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CourseWriter is a Trademark of CBT Solutions Ltd.
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