Functioning as an instructor's lecture guide and student's interactive textbook, this instructional system was developed along with John Jarrard, Shawn Coughlin, Mace Fleeger, Colleen Fahey, and Charles Voiselle at the Florida State University Center for Professional Development's Electronic Media Group. The Courseware has the ability to present hypertext, images, animations, audio and video using a variety of authoring templates.

Originally designed for teachers to author instructional texts for the Florida State University Webmaster training program, this flexible system has proven to be easily adaptable for alternate uses ranging from informational content presentation for supreme court justices, to government social education programs for first-time parents. The Courseware is flexible enough to be deployed online or on removable media.

Continuous Development

An even more feature rich version is currently in development that allows for form input and validation, inline quizzes and testing, simplified theming/skinning, and arbitrarily scripted behaviors between dynamically placed page elements. Live broadcast streaming audio and remote content control are in the process of being added to the presentation portion. These additions will allow for off-campus students to participate in on-campus lectures in real time. The Florida State University Center for Professional Development website offers more information about the FSU Webmaster training program and other courses using this system.

Technical Aspects

The Courseware container is the interactive presentation component of the Courseware's database driven content management system. The Courseware container, built with Macromedia Flash Actionscript, constructs each page according to an XML formatted page description file. Each page description file contains layout parameters, hypertext content, and references to various multimedia assets. The system maintains usage state between launches through use of persistent data storage. For example, the Courseware container's automatic bookmarking feature allows the system to return the user to the most recently viewed page. The content for each course is assembled by means of the content management system's authoring interface. Neither a web browser nor an internet connection is required for presentation of the Courseware.

More Information

Contact