Developer

The CourseWriter System

Create with Author and Deliver with Presenter

CourseWriter Developer contains everything you need to create and deliver CBT courses or multimedia presentations for the Windows platform. Developer includes:

• Author - a powerful, easy to use CBT Authoring System for creating high-quality, interactive training material.
  
  
• Presenter - a flexible Student Presentation System that can be used with or without a database.

Use CourseWriter Author to create fully interactive computer-based training courses and superb multimedia presentations. Trainers and subject experts can translate their subject knowledge and training expertise into CBT courses quickly and easily, without reference to expensive programming expertise.

• Powerful - A professional multimedia authoring system with all the facilities you need.
  
  
• Easy to Use - Designed for trainers and subject experts - not programmers.
  
  
• Fast - Creates industrial-strength CBT in a fraction of the time needed by other CBT development environments.
  
  
• Flexible - Create any combination of text, graphics, sound, animation, video and questions.
  
  
• Small footprint - Author occupies less than 10 MB of disk space (excluding courseware).
  
  
• Unlimited Capacity - No practical limit on how much course material you can create or how large or complex a course can be.
  
  
• Simple - Author is simple to install, learn and use.
  
  
• Inexpensive - Surprisingly so. See Prices.

Using Author is easy. You start by creating a lesson. Next you create the screens you want to display (we call them acts). Each act can have as many overlays (we call them scenes) as you want so it is easy for example, to make text and graphics appear and disappear. Now you can add questions, timers, animations, etc. to your scenes. All that is left then is to create a script to tie it all together. The script tells the system what to do next as the student completes each act. An act can have as many outcomes as you want. You simply tell the script what to do as a result of each outcome. It can for example, link to another act, link to another lesson, or finish the current lesson.

When you have finished creating your lesson (or presentation) you can use the Create Lesson Disk program to generate a highly compressed, installable version which you can distribute to your students. Lesson installation can be customised in many ways. You can for example, include a new front screen for Presenter, set controls for student access, and turn statistics recording on or off.

Author runs on industry-standard PCs under any version of Microsoft Windows from 95 and NT 4 upwards. It is network compatible and works equally well on a single PC or across a network. Author does not need to use the CourseWriter database.

Although not essential, you will find Author easiest to use if you have a large screen monitor (say 17 inches plus) and a reasonable graphics card. Your graphics card should be capable of running the display in full colour (trucolor) at a screen resolution of say, 1024 x 768 - or at least one higher resolution than your students will be using.

More Details are available.

Remember, if you do not have the time or resources to develop your own CBT, or you want us to develop an initial project for you, we provide a complete development service.

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

Presenter is installed on your students' systems to let them run the CBT lessons and multimedia presentations you create with Author.

Database-enabled and non-database versions of Presenter are available - Developer contains both.

Presenter is easy for students to install and has a remarkably small footprint. The non-database version can be distributed on two diskettes (floppy disks) and occupies less then 3 MB of disk space when installed. The database-enabled version fits on four diskettes and occupies less then 7 MB when installed. This makes Presenter easy to distribute using diskettes, CD-ROM, a PC network, an intranet or even email.

A Lesson Installation program is installed with Presenter. Students use this program to install new or updated lessons. Lesson installation is quite straightforward - you can even use your own lesson installation routine if you prefer.

Developer is normally supplied with a royalty-free licence to copy and distribute Presenter throughout your own organisation. See Prices for more information.

Database Version

The database-enabled version of Presenter includes an ODBC-compliant Microsoft Access database but you can 'point' Presenter at any ODBC-compliant database that you prefer to use. We will supply the layout of the database to customers on request. This means that you can also add your own routines alongside (or even in place of) CourseWriter Manager to work with your CourseWriter databases.

When used with a database Presenter can differentiate between students, instructors and authors. There are many configuration options you can set to control how Presenter gives access to users. You can for example, tell Presenter to use the user's Windows Login Id, generate a User Id automatically or insist that a known User Id and password are entered before granting access. Once logged in, you can restrict a student to a single lesson, a range of lessons, or make all the lessons available.

Similarly, there are many options to control which student statistics Presenter will record - from overall Lesson histories down to full path analysis and the responses to questions. All statistics records are time-stamped.

A Statistics Collection program is installed with Presenter. Students use this program to copy (and compress) the CourseWriter database for archive or easy transfer back to a central database.

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CourseWriter is a Trademark of CBT Solutions Ltd.
Microsoft, Microsoft Access, ODBC, Windows and Windows NT are Trademarks of Microsoft Corp.
All other Trademarks acknowledged.