Dreamweaver - Coursebuilder and Mozilla

Author

Coursebuilder and Mozilla

Fred Riley

2004-08-05, 7:15 pm

Although a DW user, and being involved in e-learning, for many years
now, I've only just started looking at CourseBuilder as a possible
solution for creating simple self-assessment exercises (MCQs, drag and
drop, text entry, etc). With some effort, I found the CourseBuilder
tutorial in PDF and tried to run the discover_nav.htm file, which is the
end product of the tutorial. Although the various interactions in this
worked fine in IE6, only a few worked in Mozilla 1.6, and certainly not
the drag and drop exercises.

Now, I'm committed to producing standards-compliant websites that will
run on any modern browser, and definitely don't want to use any
interactions that only run on IE. The CourseBuilder info page
(http://www.macromedia.com/resources.../dw_ud/coursebu
ilder/) says:

"Complex interactions created in Macromedia CourseBuilder for
Dreamweaver do not require any plug-in or applet downloads. The content
is web-native (HTML, DHTML, and JavaScript) and compatible with Netscape
and Microsoft web browsers."

Is there a data sheet anywhere with a list of interactions, how they're
generated, and with what browsers they're compatible? I know from
experience that Javascript scripts often don't work as they should in
non-IE browsers, and "DHTML" is a bit of a catch-all term.

A couple of gripes and suggestions for any Macroserfs lurking on this
board:

* there really should be a link from the CourseBuilder info page to the
CourseBuilder support site. You can get to the support site by clicking
on the Coursebuilder for Dreamweaver link to go to the entry in the
Exchange, then scrolling through the extension description to hit the
URL, but this isn't user-friendly - no big deal for us techies, but off-
putting for naive users, and if CB is up to snuff I'd like to encourage
our teaching staff to use it.

* in the Support Center, there's no direct link to the CB Tutorial in
the "Tutorial and Article Index". Instead, you have to go into
Documentation then download the PDF of either "Using CourseBuilder" or
"Using CourseBuilder Extension for Dreamweaver and UltraDev". Neither is
it obvious which of these two docs a beginner should use - is there any
difference between them, other than the last updated date? If not, why
bother putting both docs online?

* a CB FAQ would be pretty handy, rather than just dropping the user at
an index of Technote articles and the Knowledge Base.

Just my 2 Euro's worth...

Cheers

Fred
Learning Technologist, School of Nursing, University of Nottingham, UK

Fred Riley

2004-08-05, 7:15 pm

As a tangential follow-up to my own post, I wonder if CourseBuilder can
create exercises such as 1 and 4 at
http://www.hull.ac.uk/itti/agora/exercises/venezia.html which I created
over 6 years ago whilst playing around with Javascript, and which still
work! On a first inspection of CB, it doesn't look as if you can have
multiple MCQs on a page with a "Check Answers" button which will then
display tick/cross images, but then I've not yet had time to explore CB in
detail. If CB can't do it, does anyone know of a good freebie Javascript
script that can create these question sets?

As it happens, I do know of one very good piece of software for doing this,
particularly for the Languages teaching community, called Hot Potatoes (by
the wonderfully-named Half-baked Software), which is free for educational
use - see http://web.uvic.ca/hrd/halfbaked/. The only nuisance with the web
pages and JS that HP produces is that it's difficult to fit them into a
site look and feel without an awful lot of jiggery-pokery with the XHTML
code (which you then have to do all over again if you edit the question). A
great tool, though.

Cheers

Fred