(Wireless technology laboratory) 9 Steps to Making and Marketing Your CBT
No commentsBy Mark Thomas
Computer Based Training or CBT is a highly effective e-learning solution medium. A CBT can be integrated with various applications and thus proves to a very effective and appealing medium for training and educating because of its interactive capability that allows children to practice as they learn.
Moreover, CBTs are also becoming a more viable option for corporate firms and individuals alike to impart and receive training.
There are many PC applications that come with tutorials designed in the form of a CBT. With a CBT program, the user can access the information at any location and at any time.
Developing a CBT program
Developing a CBT program is however a highly technical and skilled job. You need to go slowly and must have some basic graphic designing skills to begin.
Interestingly, CBT programs can be created on a small scale too and you dont always need a huge team to make one. And if you also want to create a CBT, follow these tips:
1. Content is primary
The main issue you need to focus on is the quality of content as that is the main ingredient which must be converted into a computer program to make a CBT interesting and appealing.
2. Focus on the audience
Online training and face-to-face learning are two different things and both need different sort of treatments. Hence, for a CBT program, you need to first identify and study the characteristics of the target audience. Only after knowing the target audience, you would have a clear picture of what type of content including text, images, etc., must be included in the training module and what type of language should be used.
3. Right material
Be sure that the text used in the CBT is designed to meet the client’s needs. This means the right sub-topics within the subject must be covered. While preparing the draft, try to give answers to questions such as the overall time of the training, what topics are most important, or whether maps or diagrams are required or not.
Also decide whether you would like to incorporate materials such as video, audio, slides, pictures, and screen captures of software programs. In order to provide the best training, you need to have a solid grasp of the material.
4. Prepare a rough draft
After finding the answers of all the queries, make a rough outline of the training in a form of a formal document. Try to make it in a systematic manner so that you know which page should come next. This would help to mitigate any confusions or repetitions later.
5. Create a storyboard
On the basis of your training module, you need to create a storyboard. Make sure that the text and the images are used in the right spots and are relevant. The storyboard should layout the theme with proper focus on the text and graphics.
For instance if you are developing a CBT for kids you would need to use bright colors, images, layout and simple text.
On the other hand, if you are making a CBT as a manual for learning a software program, you would need more elaborate text, with screen shots of the various steps to follow and so on. Depending upon the requirements of the target audience, you would need to build your storyboard.
Remember every screen and frame must explain, enhance, and improve the overall learning process.
6. Choose the software
If you are making the CBT for the first time and dont have much computer knowledge, you can use Microsoft Producer for Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2003. It can be downloaded for free and it is very easy to use. With the help of Microsoft Producer, you can develop CBT at a very low cost.
7. Development
Start to layout the graphical portion of the CBT. Take the content from the storyboard and start putting the pieces together page by page. Put together all the elements and cross check to ensure that everything is put in the right place.
8. Final output
Test the final version of the course or file. Make sure to test the course in the deployed environment, where the finished product will be seen by the users. Once you are satisfied of the professional quality, you must start thinking about the distribution part.
9. Marketing
To begin with, you would need a plenty of copies of the final output. Save your production in a good quality master CD or DVD and go for CD or DVD duplication or replication from a reliable DVD duplication company. Spend some time on choosing the right company as the quality of the duplicated CDs or DVDs will play a major role in the success of your CBT.
Dont forget to look for quality CD or DVD packaging solutions too, if you dont want to spend time on designing the packaging yourself. Usually, a reliable DVD duplication company offers packaging solutions too.
Once the copies of your CBT are ready, you can distribute the same to book stores which also stock educational material and negotiate with dealers of educational material or even distribute and market it online.
Follow these steps and your CBT will be firmly on the road to success. Always give stress on the quality factor be it choosing the right material, selecting the CD/DVD format and for selecting a reliable CD or DVD duplication company.
Mark Thomas is a graphic designer who offers affordable services such as DVD replication and DVD duplication London, along with innovative CD packaging solutions. As an amateur writer his write-ups mainly focus on the various segments of CD and DVD duplication and replication.
The Progress of Science
By Marcel Lafaoe
Progress consists in the reconciling of apparent contradictions. Unity and differentiation, heredity and variability, are apparently opposed. Yet a mammal is more truly a unit than an organism that suffers little from being cut in two because each part can do the work of all. A civilised state with interdependent specialised interests suffers from the incapacity or rapacity of its classes more than a company of Fuegans, each of whom can supply all his own wants.
Science is progressing in this way. Biology cannot advance without chemistry, geology leans on physics, and this interdependence is due to specialisation, to differentiation. In organisms and states intercommunication is essential to preserve this corporate life. Without nerves and blood-vessels an amoeba may possibly get on fairly well. Fuegans do not require railways or telephones. Science requires its blood-vessels and nerves, its railways and telephones. Each member requires what is elaborated by others to be collected and sorted and distributed for its use. It is most important that’ the work done in physical science in innumerable laboratories should be collected, digested, distributed for the information of the biologist, the chemist, the geologist.
The study of the properties of each kind of matter as related to energy and the ether has bearings on every department of science and on every kind of practice ; on agriculture and medicine the practical applications of biology, and on manufactures and engineering the practical application of physics and chemistry. Whether we are using the ether to transmit energy to ploughs, or measuring the irregular energy of the tissues of a patient by a thermometer, or taking nails out of wheat with magnets, or determining the physical changes produced in materials by small amounts of impurities, we require to understand physical science, and any day some advance in it may be of service in practice.
The connections, the railways, the nerves, in this department, are fairly well supplied by the technical journals, but on the purely scientific side there is risk that an undue development of specialisation, without sufficient nourishment and communication from other parts, may lead to local turgescence and inflammation, to the injury of the system and the ultimate atrophy of the parts.
In treating of the connections of physical science with other branches of science, we may either divide physical science in some systematic way, and study the connections of each division with other sciences, or begin by consideringthe other branches of science and see how each is connected with physical science. Without some systematic and rational method, we are sure to omit outlying and unfamiliar parts of any subject of investigation.
It is possible in the compass of a short article to go over only a very small number of the various connections between physical science and science in general, and no one individual could do justice to the theme ; it is only possible here to make some suggestions as to methods of systematic division of the subject, and to point out a very few of the connecting links that at present cry for strength. Physical science may generally be described as the study of the properties of matter, energy, and ether. It is divided from chemistry by being the study of each kind of matter by itself, while chemistry studies the actions of different kinds of matter upon one another. Of course no real line can be drawn, and the enumeration of the objects of physical study is for the purpose of dividing the subject itself rather than for the purpose of dividing it from other subjects.
The properties of matter and energy, of energy and ether, and of ether and matter, are the subjects of investigation in physical science. The matter and energy region is subdivided into (1) pure dynamics of solids and fluids, that branch where mathematics reigns supreme, whether we study the motions of the planets, or of vortex rings, where we deal with regular and reversible kinetic and potential energy ; and (2) the study of irregular motions of heat and turbulence, the kinetic theory of gases and the turbulent motion of a liquid, the first and second laws of thermodynamics, the laws of specific and latent heats, of temperature and entropy, viscosity, and the limits of elasticity.
This subdivision into energy as regular and irregular is fundamental, and pervades the whole of science ; it bears on cosmology when we study the action of tide production and tidal retardation of rotation, the circulation of water up the air and down the mountains and its erosions and grindings ; it bears on chemistry when we study chemical equilibrium and heat of chemical action ; it bears on biology when we study the regular production of mechanical work, of electric currents, of nervous stimuli, and when we study the production of heat, the viscous resistance to Mow of fluids. The relations of ether and energy are comprised in the study of electro-magnetism and light. As yet we know little about the relations of irregular energy and ether, and still less how this bears on cosmology, chemistry and biology. The bearings of electro-magnetism and light on the other branches of science are too many to enumerate and too familiar to be worth enumerating.
We are yet only on the threshold of what is to be known. The connections of matter and ether are even more obscure. Why do most vegetable substances turn the plane of polarisation of light one way and animal substances the other way ? Why is terrestrial magnetism so irregular, so variable ?
Marcel is interested in the sciences, and likes to share his knowledge with others.
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Friday, August 22nd, 2008 at 3:20 pm and is filed under technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
