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Programming IT Technology

Cross-platform Computer-Based Training? 17

Posted by Cliff from the learning-to-code dept.
TeachingMachines asks: "They say that if you can't do, you teach, and if you can't teach, you teach P.E. Well, what happens when P.E. teachers become interested in programming? Wimpy educators like myself need very high-level Rapid Application Development or similar authoring environments for Computer-Based Training (CBT) so that we can call ourselves '3133t HackerZ'. Throughout my graduate training students typically used one of the two most popular authoring environments: Macromedia's popular Authorware (for Mac and MS) and Click2Learn's infinitely more powerful ToolBook (for MS only, ugh). Are there any really good authoring environments for CBT that are truly cross-platform compatible (i.e. support Linux/Solaris/Mac9/MacOSX/MS)? I ask that because a new kid showed up on the block called Norpath Elements Studio that looks to be highly integrated with Java and deploys multimedia applications cross platform. Is anyone aware of similar tools, proprietary or not?"
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Cross-platform Computer-Based Training? More

Cross-platform Computer-Based Training?

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  • REALBasic (Score:2, Informative)

    by Fifster ( 590419 )
    There's a program called REALBasic [realbasic.com] out for Mac (and maybe PC as well) that can develop multimediaish programs for Windows, MacOS 9.1 and less, and MacOS X+ with the same code. I've never used it, but as far as I know, it's quite good, graphical, pretty easy to learn/use, etc. Not sure if this solves what you are trying to solve, but good luck!

  • SkillSoft might work for you (Score:3, Interesting)

    by vjl ( 40603 ) <vjl&vjl,org> on Sunday September 22, 2002 @06:55AM (#4306392) Homepage Journal
    A few years ago we used CBT Systems courseware. It was 100% java based and accessible via the w3. Now they've been bought out by SkillSoft/Smartforce. The CBT courses covered everything from Word to Visual Basic to SQL to UNIX sysadmin'ing. There were even several Mac technology courses too.

    They have demos online you might want to check out. More info is at:

    SkillSoft [smartforce.com]

    /vjl/ [no, i don't work for them :) ]

    • SkillSoft didn't work for me... at least not using Galeon. I got an error telling me I needed to enable Java. Which, of course, is already enabled. So much for cross-platform

      So then I tried it on Mozilla 0.9.8 and it puked again.

      Finally, what the hell, I fired up my venerable Netscape 4.78 and, Viola!, it worked. I learned that MS Exchange server will cost lots more to implement than just using sendmail on a Linux box at each office. New administrators, new servers, new software... whew! No wonder there are so many MCSEs.

      Nice java when it finally worked, though. Jave would likely be the best way to implement cross platform products for this application... but it's wise to make sure that it really works across platforms. This one doesn't.
    • I also heard that PantsSoft is an excellent vendor for things. Please mod me up for this link to photos of my dog. http://dog.com/
  • The acronym "P.E." doesn't mean anything to me, nor did the term "computer-based training" at first sight. English is not my native language, plus I came right out of bed, and despite all my geek knowledge I could not even figure out what it was about, so I went searching :)
    Google, gracefully as always, returned this to the sleepy reader: "The use of software and computer equipment to aid in teaching. Software used in CBT is typically given the name courseware." Oh. Training in general, doh :) In concrete, the Macromedia article link mentions creating HTML, audio and video tutorials. More searches point me to courses themselves, not the software to create them. It's a pity, there doesn't seem any open-source IDE to be around..

    So, I can't help. But I hope this context might be useful for others. And uh, good morning Europe :)

  • p.e? (Score:2)

    by joto ( 134244 )
    Physical education? I'm quite sure that if you can't teach, and is therefore teaching physical education, and you want to use computer-based training instead of a gymnasium, then you are right in that you don't know how to teach.

    On the other hand, you might have some other meaning for P.E. than the first one that popped into my head. Might I be so bold as to ask you to define your abbreviations at least once?

  • Coursebuilder? (Score:3, Informative)

    by GregWebb ( 26123 ) on Sunday September 22, 2002 @11:18AM (#4306902)
    Macromedia certainly used to produce an addon for Dreamweaver called Coursebuilder which, IIRC (only looked at it briefly, it's only of peripheral relevance to my job) was rather nice and a free add-on.

    Toolbook produces strange HTML which doesn't translate that nicely to stuff other than Win/IE from what I recall. Authorware I've not noticed I've come across. Flash / Director require plugins (duh...), Director is a pain to integrate into a Learning Management System. Seminar4Web is another I've come across - again, only really works well with Win/IE and even then it's a little strange to put it tactfully. It's also rather expensive.

    I'd look at what you're looking to do, though. For a lot of courses, thinking about how the content should work and it all fit together, it's not rocket science to do the HTML. Breaking the learning down properly into components is interesting, but you're trained educators, right?

    My advice? Get the CS department to lay you out a template that you can drop content into and do simple, JavaScript testing. That's not complicated, it's all that's required and will make a nice project for a student.

    This is assuming a reasonably small scope, though. If you're ultimately looking at moving this to a larger managed learning environment (which isn't necessarily appropriate) then you'll be better off pumping out stuff which is AICC (http://www.aicc.org/) and / or SCORM (http://www.adlnet.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=scorma bt&cfid=286743&cftoken=76681359) compliant. For this, you want to use pro tools. A managed learning environment working with non-standards based courses isn't a problem (I write such beasts day in day out) but it does complicate matters. I suppose a student could do this as a project again but, erm, I wouldn't recommend it, having read the standards :-)
  • Squeak is a really high level language that does multimedia real well, and runs on a variety of platforms.
  • You could use SMIL which is a Real Player extension that would allow you to create Powerpoint-like presentations.

  • Dear Slashdot (Score:3, Funny)

    by quintessent ( 197518 ) <my usr name on toofgiB [tod] moc> on Monday September 23, 2002 @05:27AM (#4310157) Journal
    I have a friend who really wants to make money. He has a product, but no advertising. I was thinking, maybe if I submitted to Slashdot a big long question, and ended it by mentioning his product, then maybe I'd get a ton of free exposure. There's a new program called Slashdot Question Generator that can do this, but do you know of any others?

  • My CBTs (Score:2)

    by Enry ( 630 )
    I have done a number of CBTs on Red Hat Linux that run both on Linux and Windows.

    We just used HTML and a small web server that runs under both OSes (I want to say a perl-based one, but I didn't do the production). My authoring was in HTML, and video was in Real, but only because Divx wan't popular enough at the time, and MPEG created videos that were too big.

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