1. Introducing Design-Assess

How certain are you that everyone in your organization understands your products and services?

- Are your salespeople prepared (certified) to sell your company’s products or services?
- Is your Product Management team confident that everyone is on the “same page”?
- Do your tech support people have the knowledge to take care of your customers in a timely and professional fashion?

It is easy to find out. MindIQ is pleased to announce the release of its newest service, Design-Assess using its Design-a-Course™ e-Learning technology.

This new service is quick, easy, and very cost effective. To get started, simply click here to download a question template and order form. You enter a pool of up to 25 questions and answers in a true/false, multiple choice, multiple choice select-all-that-apply, or fill-in-the-blank format. If you like, you can also upload your logo to brand your assessment.

Within 72 hours you will receive 24x7 access to:
- Your own unique URL on MindIQ's secure servers with your formatted assessment
- An on-line registration screen for your students with registration fields you select
- Registration capacity for up to 500 students
- A "Professor" user name and password for you to monitor and certify results

Best of all the cost is only:
- $500 for six months access, per assessment for up to 500 worldwide users.
- Each additional question over 25 is $50
- Each additional student over 500 is $10

You can randomize your questions, display a different pool of questions each time, determine the number of times a student can take the assessment, and more.

Why is assessment so important?
In an economy where every penny counts, management wants an ROI on practically every initiative. Ben Worthen of CIO magazine reports, "Conducting an ROI of training calls for stringent goal setting and continuous analysis. Mathematically, ROI is a comparison of benefits to cost expressed as a percentage of the original investment. In simpler terms, it is a way of finding if the training met its goals to an extent that justified its cost." Design-Assess can provide the training ROI you need to support and help you meet your training goals.

To see how Design-Assess works, try our UNIX on-line assessment at:

https://www.designacourse.com/introunixpre/action-frameset/?targetAction=page-login

By Robert Jaques (01-06-2004)
Contributing writer for vnunet.com
Important part of the mix for higher education, say teaching professionals.

An overwhelming majority of UK lecturers believe that e-learning can "significantly strengthen" the higher education that students receive. A significant number of lecturers who responded to a poll commissioned by an e-learning firm stated that online learning improves both teaching creativity and student learning success. The survey received replies from more than 150 lecturers in UK higher education institutions, teaching courses ranging from bioscience to history to music.

More than 90 per cent of respondents believed classroom-based teaching combined with online learning to be more effective than classroom-based teaching alone.

" Online learning has the potential to bring new opportunities to higher education," said Stuart Hirst, teaching fellow at Leeds Metropolitan University." More and more students are now studying part-time, or are unable to attend every lecture because of conflicting demands on their time. " It is no longer sufficient to offer only face-to-face teaching and assessment and, without online facilities, the problems of student retention and decreasing success rates would be exacerbated."

The research also found that 83 per cent of lecturers have received positive feedback from their students in response to introducing online teaching and learning.

Design-a-Course version 2 offers form-based login. If you choose, this option can replace the old popup dialog for login with a full HTML form. Although the primary purpose is to increase your ability to brand the Design-a-Course training product by displaying your company’s logo and graphics earlier in the user’s experience. This feature can also be used to blend Design-a-Course into your custom e-Learning portal or informational site.

The technical information you need to accomplish this is simple. You need only provide two parameters to a specialized Design-a-Course start URL. Your specialized start URL for single sign-on is built by adding“ /action-login” to the end of your Design-a-Course URL. The request you send to your specialized URL should have two form parameters called“ username” and “password”, which should contain the Design-a-Course login for the user.

So if your URL is normally,
https://designacourse.com/acme

then you could submit login information to,
https://designacourse.com/acme/action-login

It’s that simple! You can place a new login form inside an existing page, such as in a header bar for your company intranet site on training. You would provide your own form fields embedded into another page hosted outside of Design-a-Course, but target it toward Design-a-Course so that students can log in and access their Design-a-Course account information with a minimal footprint. The HTML for such a form might look like this (replacing your company name in the URL):

You can copy and paste the code below directly into your own html pages. You only need to change the company name (acme) to your account name.

< form action="https://designacourse.com/acme/action-login"
method="POST">
< table width="185" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">
< tr>
< td width="85"><font size="2" face="Arial">Username:</font></td>
< td width="90"><input type="text" name="username" size="15"/></td>
< /tr>
< tr>
< td><font size="2" face="Arial">Password:</font></td>
< td><input type="password" name="password" size="15"/></td>
< /tr>
< tr>
< td>&nbsp;</td>
< td><input name="submit" type="submit" value="Login"/></td>
< /tr>
< /table>
< /form>

MindIQ is pleased to extend a 50% discount to our non-profit customers. We understand the work, time, and commitment involved in most non-profit organizations. And since most non-profits are operating on very limited budgets, we wanted to extend a generous discount offer to them so that their training initiatives are not put on hold due to limited funds. “Legitimate non-profits are a very important component of our society. Businesses should do what they can to support them so that they can thrive,” says Nina Buik, SVP of MindIQ.

For more information on our non-profit discount program, please contact sales@mindiq.com or call MindIQ at 800-511-5299.

by Danielle Vallee
www.daniellevallee.com

The first time company resources consider e-Learning, they might be overwhelmed by the amount of information thrown at them. This can give the impression that e-Learning cannot be initiated without involving major resources and dollars. This can be true indeed, especially when the projects are not well defined. However, it is possible to produce a course in e-Learning format for very little money. Here is how.

You can give e-Learning a try in your enterprise by starting with a simple course that will be stand-alone, i.e. not managed by a Learning Management System or technically dependent of the general infrastructure. All you need to do this is a network of computers. You can design a course using hyperlinks and images and program the links to be self contained within the course. If your students have access to the Internet, you could also add links to outside resources, but they are not necessarily essential in the design of your course.

Frames are a feature that will help you a great deal when designing such a course, because they provide you with a flexibility that can otherwise be achieved by dynamic interactions from a specialized server. Of course, frames cannot do everything that kind of server does, but they can reach a very satisfactory level of interdependencies when dispatching various elements on the screen. Using frames is described in more detail below.

Online Web Courses: Frames or No Frames?
Although technical people do not generally like frames and often discourage their use within a company, the fact remains that frames are a first rate tool for e-Learning material, especially where there is no database available. For instance, when a database is used, modifications are done once and the data is served in various places by the database. Where there is no database, frames allow a Web page to be divided in sections and called at will. This means that you use the information on one page rather than having to duplicate it on all pages. Frames allow the presentation of complex material in a very streamlined way, because various frames keep their respective information on the page, while other frames can present new information within the same page.
Let's take the example of a Web page that contains a table of content and a header, in addition to the main content section. What you see in the following image is a set of frames, called a FRAMESET.

In the above example, all three elements are separate: the header (top), the table of contents (toc) and the main page (main). This means that there is only one table of content and that it is not reproduced on every page. This also means that if you need to make a change to the table of contents, you do it only once.

Another advantage is that you can maintain part of the information on the screen while the rest of the page can be changed. You can also lead the user from one link to another, either in the same frame or from one frame to the other. Let's illustrate this based on our previous example that contains 3 frames. You can use this structure in a basic way, i.e. from the table of content; make the content of the main frame change at will. Or, you can call a second frameset in the main frame and interact between those 2 frames.

This means that a second frameset (Frameset 2) can be embedded in one of the initial frames (main) of the first frameset (Frameset 1), and main is still present underneath main2 and nav. Regarding the navigation, the result is that you can go down 4 levels in 3 clicks: 1) by clicking in the Table of Contents (toc), which will make the new frameset (Frameset 2) appear, 2) by clicking in the Navigation Bar (nav) at the bottom of the second frameset (Frameset 2) and getting a new page in the main page of the second frameset (main 2), and 3) by clicking on the page now shown in main2 and calling another page (if a link is present). The second frameset could be changed at will without changing the Table of Content and the Header.

When asked why they do not like frames, technical people do not always have a reason. Although frames can have some disadvantages, as everything on this earth, they definitely offer you an interesting option for your courses and are particularly useful to e-Learning.

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