With company intranets, extranets, and the Internet blurring together, Web designers and developers will be even more grateful to have the help of CourseBuilder for Dreamweaver in building customer interaction, education, and help sites. The mind you save may well be your own!
As an enhancement library for Dreamweaver 3.0, CourseBuilder simplifies both the visual application of interactive elements (sliders, customized submit buttons, images that swap out when a user clicks on the right page location, or drag-and-drop functionality) and building the stuff of grammar-school terror: multiple choice, true/false, check all that apply, fill in the blank. As is the case when using Dreamweaver, it's helpful to have some knowledge of the coding behind the scenes while working on your Web projects. However, CourseBuilder can save even the expert a large amount of time through its preformatted sequences.
Functional improvements over the earlier version include the ability to edit an interaction you've just created, embed Authorware packages in a Web page, and assign a separate layer to a CourseBuilder Interaction. The new ability to undo your mistakes, action by action, is a great blessing; in a Web-authoring tool rich with buttons and menus, it was good to see a few subtle enhancements to the interface for clarity of use.
For those who want to get fancy with databases and server-side scripts, CourseBuilder can accommodate sending data through HTML, ASP, and Cold Fusion tags. If your Web server is running computer-managed instruction software (CMI), such as Lotus Pathware 3.02 or higher, CourseBuilder also has a feature called Knowledge Track, enabling your interaction to communicate its data back to the CMI server. All in all, CourseBuilder is a strong enhancement to the rich Dreamweaver environment. --
Betsy Aoki
