Macromedia is offering a new “How to Build a Web Site” tutorial at the company’s TrainingCafe.com Web site. The tutorial is debuting at this week’s EDUCAUSE education conference in Indianapolis, IN.
TrainingCafe.com, which requires free registration, is designed to help faculty interested in building Web sites by simplifying the process with easy-to-build course Web sites with instruction, examples and free Macromedia Dreamweaver templates, according to Kirsti Aho, the company’s director of Education and Learning.
Though pressure is building on higher-ed faculty members to supplement classes with course Web sites and while the majority of college students say they use the Web for college work, only 40 percent of four-year college faculty and 22 percent of two-year college faculty have course Web sites, according to Macromedia.
“The tutorial is targeted to the higher education market,” Aho told MacCentral. “Many faculty in this area are new to the tools for building Web sites and for creating online courses.”
The new “How to Build a Course Web Site” tutorial lets instructors and professors with little computer skills build a full-featured course Web site in a few hours using Dreamweaver, she said. The tutorial offers step-by-step instructions and fill-in-the-blank templates. Using these items, faculty members can create a Web site complete with syllabus, detailed assignments, instructional materials and community, Aho said.
The tutorial’s instructions come with screenshots to simplify the learning process, she said. Plus, the templates are available in Mac and Windows flavors, she added.
The tutorial was written by Patti Shank, an instructional technologist and instructor at the University of Denver. Both the tutorial and Dreamweaver templates are fully Section 508 compliant, ensuring that the content will be available to people with disabilities.
Aho said that accessibility and e-learning are two of Macromedia’s main focuses at this week’s EDUCAUSE conference. The company’s Dreamweaver and UltraDev are leading products in these areas and Flash is “quickly evolving,” she said.
Also, at EDUCAUSE, Macromedia announced the immediate availability of the Macromedia eLearning Studio, which combines Authorware 6, the visual authoring product for creating e-learning applications, with Flash 5 and Dreamweaver 4. Authorware is not Mac-compatible, though the end results, the e-learning apps themselves, are.