Using Dreamweaver to Create eLearning Presentations

 by Jerry Marino

For those of us creating education, training, information or multimedia-enhanced websites, Macromedia’s Dreamweaver offers many advantages as a web editor. It’s powerful and flexible, allowing a great range of content and navigational schemes. With its many built in tools and standardized functions, you can easily perform complex tasks and behaviors. Dreamweaver easily integrates graphics and multimedia and provides great control over how you present them. And it’s powerful enough to allow you to develop a database driven website using Coldfusion, Active Server Pages or other dynamic technology. 

 The downside of Dreamweaver is its considerable learning curve. It may take you a while before you feel comfortable with many of Dreamweaver's advanced functions. In addition, to get the best results, you need to plan out your web site in advance rather than think it up as you go. Before using Dreamweaver I created and edited web pages with Microsoft FrontPage; although self taught I could put a web site up quickly and on the fly. I could easily drag and drop pages to rearrange the navigation until I had it the way I wanted it. If you’re using Dreamweaver, you’ll have to plan more but the results are worth it.

 Dreamweaver has several tools to help design and layout pages. The site map function allows you to design your site navigation and display it in a hierarchical form. Tracing images let you create page layouts and superimpose their transparent image over the page you’re creating so you can line up your image files to match the image and your layout. You can create templates of standard pages and with editable regions and then customize the individual pages within your standard template design. This works well when you’re working in a team and need to standardize design and styles. Just distribute the templates to your team, let them create individual pages and then assemble your site according to your design.

 Extensions and add-ins are very cool and most are free. I especially like the lorem ipsum and corporate mumbo-jumbo text generators. When you want to see what text will look like on a page, just tell Dreamweaver which text you want and how many words you want to insert. Presto-chango there they are. It's a great time saver.

 Dreamweaver can easily inserts objects like tables, tags, images, links, graphics, and multimedia objects and provides tools to manage them. Property windows for each simplify the process and enable you to easily create complex pages and behaviors.  Once objects are on the page you can control them by attaching JavaScript functions. You may be surprised to see how fast you can manipulate objects with the standard JavaScript behaviors embedded in Dreamweaver.

 There are two Dreamweaver functions I think that are particularly helpful for those of us developing “elearning” programs. One is the ability to insert layers on your pages and then control those layers (what appears and when it appears) with behaviors. You can have questions, examples or practice exercises appear “on click”, “on roll over” or on “page loading”. Very slick. In addition you can add-in Dreamweaver’s Coursebuilder functions. These provide the developer with flexibility for inserting interactions—multiple choice questions, drag and drop matching, exploring with hotspots—and then give feedback to the users. By connecting these to a back end database you can manage students as they progress through your “elearning” program.

 The graduate program in Educational Technology where I’m a Masters Degree student utilizes Dreamweaver for all multimedia development courses. I started using it under protest but now that I’ve become more adept, I find it’s easy to use. I can usually get each element on a page to stay where I want and get every page to behave within an acceptable level of tolerance. (Does any web page ever behave like you want?) Here’s a link to the Encyclopedia of Educational Technology (http://coe.sdsu.edu/eet/), which is created entirely in Dreamweaver.  Each page was created by a different student using the style guidelines and style sheets created by the author, Dr. Bob Hoffman. In addition, here’s a link to my page that uses layers and a QuickTime movie to explain the use of pedagogical agents. (http://coe.sdsu.edu/eet/Articles/pedagents/start.htm).

 So if you’re creating “elearning” web sites or presenting information online I suggest you check out Dreamweaver. Once you’re up to speed I think you’ll greatly appreciate the flexibility and power it will provide to deliver “elearning” and other multimedia information content.

 Jerry Marino

gem@marinogroup.com