Mike_Nowak@itd.umich.edu (Michael Nowak) (05/23/91)
The Office of Instructional Technology at the University of Michigan provides assistance in instructional design, development, and evaluation for instruction using information technology. Most of our development has been done on the Macintosh, and some has been done on systems using Microsoft Windows. In most cases, we use authoring systems such as HyperCard, SuperCard, and ToolBook to do our development. These authoring systems provide a higher level of tools for software design than most programming languages and are easy enough that those faculty members who are new to computers can learn how to use them fairly quickly. A faculty member in the school of Engineering is interested in developing some instructionalk software for UNIX-based workstations running X windows. In particular, he's interested in designing software which includes pages of text and graphics which are linked together in a hypertext-type system, as well as simulations, animations, and other interactive modules. This software would be used in courses dealing with fluid dynamics. The only such UNIX-based authoring system I'm aware of is CMU Tutor, which I used a few years ago. Is this system still used and is it available for X windows? Are there other such systems for putting together instructional software? Or, is most work of this type put together with more traditional programming toolkits? Any help is appreciated. I will collect all messages and present a summary on the net. Michael Nowak, University of Michigan Office of Instructional Technology.