Myrnham Associates

CourseManager Details

Table of Contents

Overview
Using CourseManager
Customising CourseManager

Overview

Myrnham Associates' CourseManager™ is a tool for customising and compiling instructor-led training manuals developed through its partner application CourseComposer™. In CourseManager™ you are able to make your own courses based on your own library of existing content - for example Microsoft Office XP.

You can select any number of existing courses to create your own manual. In CourseManager™ you drag and drop chapters, topics and components from existing courses into a new customisation project which can then be compiled into a manual in a number of different formats:

Microsoft Word (*.doc)
Adobe Acrobat (*.pdf)
HTML (Single file)
Chunked HTML (Separate files)
Eclipse InfoCenter
Windows HTML Help
XML

All customisation data is held within each project allowing you to quickly generate course notes, tutor notes and full courses from a single course development cycle.

Requirements

The minimum requirements for installing and using the Myrnham Associates CourseManager™ are as follows:

Pentium 500MHz or equivalent:
- 10Gb disk space
- 128Mb Memory
- Windows 98/ME
- Microsoft Word 2000
Pentium 500MHz or equivalent:
- 10Gb disk space
- 256Mb Memory
- Windows 2000 or Windows XP
- Microsoft Word 2000 or Word XP
CD-ROM Drive

Installing your software

CourseManager™ should be installed using Administration rights. Initial installation will provide a fully functional 30-day trial but by registering the software with a Customer ID that was supplied to you on purchase by your vendor, you can remove the 30-day trial.

Using CourseManager

Myrnham Associates' CourseManager™ is the partner application to Myrnham Associates' CourseComposer™. Together,they provide a one-stop, singling source solution to your courseware authoring, management and customisation needs.

CourseManager™ is a tool for customising and compiling Instructor-led training manuals developed through its partner application, CourseComposer™ (including courseware licensed from Myrnham Associates).

Courseware authors can drag and drop chapters, topics and components from existing courses (developed through CourseComposer™) into a new customisation project which is then compiled into a manual using a number of formats including Microsoft Word, Adobe Acrobat, Eclipse InfoCenter and a number of different HTML output formats. All customisation data is held within each project allowing the author to quickly generate course notes, tutor notes and full courses from a single course development cycle.

CourseManager™ and CourseComposer™ use XML to store the course content using an industry standard dialect called DocBook. The DocBook DTD is an Industry standard XML tool used by many Linux developers and trainers to develop their content. DocBook is widely used by the Linux community and is becoming more popular within the Windows community where document portability is becoming more important.

CourseComposer™ documents are fully compatible with DocBook and can be read and edited using any of the many XML Parsers available. In addition, the documents may be rendered using any of the Style Management systems (XSL for example) that is supported by DocBook.

CourseManager™ leverages the DocBook XSL Stylesheets available from Oasis.

For more information on XML visit www.xml.com

For more information on DocBook visit www.oasis-open.org/docbook

Course Management

CourseManager™ needs to know what courses have been developed using CourseComposer™ and are available for compiling.

Course Management on the Tools menu, allows you to import courses to make them available to CourseManager™ and also remove unwanted material.

Check the Myrnham Associates website (www.myrnham.com) for both commercial and open source course packages available to you. The commercial packages require a separate Vendor File to be installed when the package is installed.

Vendor Files are supplied by Myrnham Associates at the same time as the package. Select Add/Update Vendor File from the Tools menu to install the new or updated Vendor file.

	Important
	Vendor Files must be installed before attempting to install the package.

Creating a new Project

With CourseManager™ you can create customised manuals from existing courseware created using CourseComposer™ or from courseware licensed from Myrnham Associates.

You can select any number of existing courses from which to create a customised course. To create a new manual choose New from the File menu. After selecting a manual Title and optional Subtitle, the current project is displayed where you can drag and drop selected items from the Source pane on the left, to the new manual on the right. Using this process you build up a Tree view of the new course and can move or delete items as necessary.

Entries on the Status Bar track the estimated number of pages for the project as well as the estimated length of the course.

You can specify which components you want to include in the manual when it is complied. For example, you may want to create a set of tutor notes that includes only the Discussion elements of each topic. By editing the Project Options, you can tick the Discussion checkbox and remove the ticks from the other components prior to compiling.

	Note
	The Project Options you set apply to all output formats.

For reference purposes, it is possible to create a Course Outline that summarises the topics included in the customised course. To do this choose Course Outline from the Project menu.

Editing a Project

Manipulating the Content

Editing a project is as easy as dragging Chapters, Topics and Elements from the Chosen Sources pane to the appropriate elements in the Current Project pane.

By Right-clicking in the Chosen Sources pane, it is possible to add and remove courseware from the source pane. If you need to drag all the chapters and topics over to the project pane, you can use the Include Book pop-up menu option. Using the Shift key when dragging items onto the project pane, you can drag the selected item and leave it's children behind.

Figure 1. The Source & Project panes

Right-clicking in the Current Project pane will present a pop-up menu to allow you to move items up or down or to delete items. It's also possible to drag items within the project pane to customise your project as desired.

Project Options

Figure 2. Project menu - Project Options

Select Project Options from the Project menu to specify how the project should appear when compiled.

Figure 3. Project Options dialog

The following table outlines the features available.

Feature	Description
Headings section
Title & Subtitle	The title and optional subtitle of the project printed on the front cover.
Page Header & Page Footer	The text entered in the header and footer sections of each page in the book when compiled. In the case of the footer, this text is in addition to the page number which is automatically included.
Templates & Logos section
MS Word Template	When compiling to Word, this template is applied to the final document and contains the required docuemnt styling. Any number of Word Templates (standard `*.dot` files) can be added to the system and selected from this option.
Cover Page Image	Name of an optional image or logo to be used on the front page of the book. This should be a PNG file stored in the `..\common\` folder.
Legal Notices Template	The name of the file to be included in the final document that contains licensing/legal information. This should be a DocBook XML file with a `*.legalnotice` file extension. Check the default `Myrnham.legalnotice` for an example that you may adjust to suit your own requirements.
Notices Language	Some document text that the compiler produces is hard-coded into CourseManager™. This setting allows you to set an ISO639/ISO3166 compliant language/country code (eg. UK English is en_GB, US English is en_US)
Include DocBook logo on Cover	The official "Created with DocBook" logo (known as the Duck logo) can be included in the footer section of the cover page.
Features section
Include Chapter Abstracts	Defined as “[abstract] is expected to contain some sort of summary of the content with which it is associated (by containment)” in DocBook: The Definitive Guide, the abstract can be optionally included in the compiled book on the first page after the Chapter title page.
Include Section Abstracts	See above. This option applies to abtracts that may be found in Topics.
Include Component Headings	Topic components (Discussion, Step-by-Step etc.) are generally hard-coded with titles of "Discussion", "Step-by-Step" etc. Sometimes more descriptive title text is included in the component's subtitle. This option allows for the titles to be hidden and the subtitles to be promoted to headings where necessary.
Include Wrap-up Topics in Chapters	Optionally include a short Topic at the end of each chapter that summerises the Topics covered in that chapter.
Allow cells to break across pages	Optionally allows the cells of large tables to automatically split across multiple pages in the most efficient manner. (ie. saves paper).
Allow Topics to start on new page	Forces Topics onto a new page. Note - This option can also be controlled by the Word Template (see above).
Force Odd Pages	Force new sections (ie Chapters, Table of Contents, Index etc.) to start on a new odd numbered page - In an open book, the odd pages are allows on the right-hand side.
Treat images in Word as links	A large book may contain a large number of images that could easily swell the file size quite dramatically. CourseManager™ can create documents with "linked images" which means the images stay in their installed folder on your hard drive and links to those images are created in Word rather than pasting in the actual image itself. Using Links can speed up document creation and also save space.
Fit Outlines to A4 page	Course Outlines are created as HTML documents. When creating a Course Outline, you can optionally force CourseManager™ to size the HTML document to the equivalent of A4 by wrapping the text into columns. When printed through a Web Browser, the Outline will require a single sheet of paper.
Include Topic elements section
Tick the elements you want included in the compiled document. For example, for a particular course you may want to create Tutor Notes containing just discussions, a Course Guide with just step-by-step procedures and exercises, and a Quick Guide containing just methods.
Include Book elements section
Tick the sections you want included.

Table 1. Project Options features

Project Option Profiles

In the Project Options dialog, it is possible to apply a selected Profile. A Profile can be considered as a set of regularily used Project Options that can be applied for different types of documents. For example, you may supply training books to a number of different departments within your organisation, you can set up profiles that include different Cover Page images, Headers, Footers etc. for each department. That way you can quickly create a set of documents with identical content customised specifically for your target audiences - in a flash!

	Note
	From within the Project Options dialog, you can create your own profile by pressing Ctrl+Alt+P

Compiling a Project

You can now compile the project into any of the supported Output Formats as shown in Figure 4, “The Project Menu”.

Figure 4. The Project Menu

CourseManager™ uses a Java back-end to compile the project and it's progress can be tracked using the Output Manager dialog.

Figure 5. The Output Manager

	Note
	Most projects will compile within 3-4 minutes. Output to Word may take a couple of minutes longer.

	Note
	When compiling to Word, CourseManager™ defaults to showing it's compilation progress within Word itself. You can speed up the compilation process by hiding Word at this point. To do this set Show Word to False in CourseManager™'s Preferences (FilePreferencesFeatures).