History lessons

The concept of an authoring system is not a new one. As long as there has been computer-based learning – and that’s well over 20 years now – we’ve had highly sophisticated tools to assist us in product development. Few readers will want to admit their recollections of such legendary brands as Plato, Wicat, TenCore and Microtext, yet these systems provided interactive capabilities which many products fail to deliver today.

In the 90s, three products emerged as front runners in the race to support the potential of multimedia CD-ROM on PCs and Macs. Macromedia Director provided the animation capabilities and audio-visual power. Authorware, from the same stable, along with Toolbook from Asymetrix (now Click2Learn) provided the specific functionality required for learning applications. These tools matured and provided an increasingly-sophisticated feature set. All was well, but then along came the Internet.

As you may have heard me say before, networks change everything. E-learning provides pleasures that CD-ROM could only dream of, not least interaction between learners and between learners and tutors. It also brings its share of pains, largely because of constrained bandwidth (even a x1 CD-ROM – and yes they did once exist – supplied data at 170K a second, whereas some of us are still stuck with 28K modems).

All at once, nobody wanted to make learning applications that ran as executable files on CD-ROMs or from hard drives; they wanted network delivery through a browser. And that’s when the fun started. Products like Director, Authorware and Toolbook output their data in the form of massive files in their own proprietary formats. The only way that browser delivery could be accomplished was using special plug-ins (Shockwave for the Macromedia products and Neuron for Toolbook) and then only with severe bandwidth difficulties. Because, for some peculiar reason, many IT departments seem to regard plug-ins as of the work of the devil, and bandwidth constraints are going to be with us for years to come, these could only be temporary solutions. E-learning needed e-learning authoring tools.