Computer Based Training

 

Benefits of Computer Based Training

• Training can be available anywhere at any time. It can easily accomodate the learner's schedule.
• Students can progress at their own pace.
• Students can repeat all or a portion of the training as often as necessary.
• The software can keep track of how the student is progressing.  If the student needs extra help, the software can link the student back to educational material that will go through at a slower pace or handle the material from a different approach.
• Student receives instant feedback
• It can provide feedback to the instructor, providing reports on how well the student did as well as how long the student took to finish each area of the CBT as well as the entire lesson.  The software can track this for each student, then do comparisons to see in which areas the student(s) are having problems so that the teacher knows where  to put more emphasis.
• Material should be better because it is likely that more planning and thought went into creating the CBT than a normal lesson plan.
• CBT can address the different ways students learn because it usually provides different types of media such as text, audio, video, animation, graphics, etc.
• All students get the same lesson (If a teacher lectures to multiple sections of the same class, the instructor may say different things to each class or forget entirely to say something important to one of the sections)
• CBT can provide simulations.  Simulations can provide training that otherwise would be too expensive, dangerous, or impossible in a real environment.  For example, I provided CBT training for a steel mill where training on the work floor was impossible because it was so loud you couldn't hear anything.  Also, some conditions that the workers needed to be trainined for rarely happened.  The employees also needed to have practice on what to do when something went wrong.  The only way to give them  practice that could be repeated was to provide simulations.
• It can easily provide drill and practice.
• CBT provides confidentiality for a student.  Other students will be unaware of how well the student is doing.
• Once it is created, it can be used year after year.

Further Notes on Computer Based Training

CBT must be interactive; if not, the student will soon be disengaged and all benefits of CBT will be lost.

If CBT is used in a classroom, an instructor should be available to answer questions.

With the software we have today, CBT can often be created fairly quickly depending upon what is desired.  Really good CBT, often takes time to gather materials, create and edit moves and animation, do voice overs, create test, etc.  This also requires extra expense.  In these cases, you will only want to create CBT for training that you will be providing for many students or that you will be using over and over again.

When creating CBT you will need a Subject Matter Expert(SME) if you are not an expert in the subject yourself.  You may also need someone skilled in graphics, and reviewers.

Software for creating CBT

Captivate
This program has the ability to record any action you perform on screen then repeat those steps as part of a demo or it can let the learner interactively repeat those steps. This makes this program great for training users to use different programs.  Captivate can create programs in either Flash or HTML5 format.

Articulate Storyline
Storyline is very easy to use.  It comes with prebuilt slide templates that contain interactivity.    You can always create your own slides and add interactivity to them  or you can edit a template to fit your needs.  It comes with many characters that you can  insert into your lessons and expressions.

HyperStudio In the early days of CBT, the best and easiest way to create CBT was to use programs that used card stacks.  These early programs such as Hypercard and Supercard were extremely easy and fun to use.   Young students in many schools even created their own programs as part of an assignment.  Programs like these gave Apple a distinct advantage over PCs in the education market. Unfortunately these programs have disappeared but there is still one left and that is HyperStudio.  HyperStudio had a long lull between version 4 and 5.  It seemed that HyperStudio was going to meet the same fate as the others but now HyperStudio 5.2 is out and with major improvements.

HTML
Hypertext Mark up Lanaguage (HTML) is the language behind web sites.  HTML 5 is the latest version.  It takes time to become very effective with HTML but there are programs that provide WYSIWYG editors that convert what you create into HTML such as Adobe Dreamweaver and Microsoft's Expression Web.   Microsoft has discontinued selling Expression Web but now it is available for free by download.

Adobe Acrobat
 You can create a good deal of your CBT in Word then save the results as a pdf file.  The pdf file can then be edited with Adobe Acrobat.  Animations and Videos can be added.  You can call up other applications from within the pdf file.

Visual  Studio
If you are a programmer you can program your own CBT.  Creating  your own program makes it almost unlimited to what you can do, though it will take you longer to develop.  An environment such as Visual Studio that contains many objects speeds up the process.  There are also many 3rd party objects that you can add in.

Example of Interactive Video