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A modern, efficient system for authoring and network deployment of teaching
material for courses and classes should support a rather long list of
features:
- Authoring presentations in an efficient way, with full graphical
user interface, formatting wizards, support for templates, clip-arts,
icons, etc.,
- Storing courseware meta-data, i.e., author name, creation and last
modification dates, purpose, keywords, etc.,
- Displaying prepared courseware locally and remotely, by the use
of intranets and the Internet,
- Search tools,
- Editing and reusing previously prepared material,
- Creating a directory (hierarchy) of presentations,
- Storing presentations in one place and in a uniform way,
- Storing additional data for presentations: add-ons (i.e., addresses
of repositories with additional information about presented topics),
sounds, programs, applets, examples, etc.
Only few of these requirements are supported by the existing systems,
such as Microsoft PowerPoint, CorelDraw!, and Lotus Notes. WebWisdom™
2000 system meets all of the requirements listed above, and support many
other exciting productivity features.
The most important principles used in design of the WebWisdom 2000 system
are:
- Scalable database repository for courseware, metadata, and associated
media objects,
- Full graphical user interface,
- Integration with popular Office software,
- Uniform internal data format with multimedia support,
- Multi-user access for concurrent, team-based teaching material
management,
- XML-based Educational Template Definition Language (ETDL)
- User-defined templates and properties for individualized courseware
graphical presentation,
- Extensible hierarchy of eduworlds, presentations, and educational
objects,
- Hierarchical properties inheritance scheme,
- User access rights and privileges (security),
- Extended, standards-compliant metadata for courseware and users,
- Tools for managing presentations, eduworlds, users, metadata, etc.
The key functional features of WebWisdom 2000 include:
- Use of an object-relational database as a repository for presentations,
- Automated import of presentations prepared by popular a editing
tools, such as Microsoft PowerPoint, Authorware (optional input filter
needed), or arbitrary HTML authoring tools,
- Support for sets of images and/or texts prepared by any image-
or text-processing tool (scanned pictures, formatted texts, text and
graphics documents, HTML documents),
- Inclusion of programs written in any programming language, Java
applets, interactive examples, etc., in the courseware,
- Consistent and unified presentation storage, independent of the
presentation type, its structure, editing tool, etc.,
- Storage of the presentation meta-data (we use IMS metadata standard),
- Storage of some additional information for presentations, e.g add-ons
(lists of URLs of Internet resources), sounds and video clips, glossaries,
quizzes etc,
- Copying, moving, editing, renaming, and deleting presentations,
Composing new presentation based partly or entirely of other presentations
or their parts,
- Managing sets of presentations in a hierarchy of "eduworlds",
- Managing users and user privileges (security),
- Enabling different methods of displaying presentations by the use
of templates,
- Exporting (i.e., displaying) presentations locally and remotely
(by the use of Internet) in a form described by a given template,
- Extensibility—possibility to define new templates with new
attributes, which will be stored in existing data structures.
This data sheet only lists most important features of the system. Call
today for more information or for demonstration and evaluation versions
of the WebWisdom 2000 software, as well as for the information about installation
and deployment services and administrator and end-user training.
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