Software developer offers teaching tool to schools
Colleges
hesitant to embrace
multimedia, even if it’s free
By Kevin Heinrichs ChristianWeek staff
TORONTO–Lynda Douglas owns and runs a successful software development company called WriteData that produces N-Lightning , a software program that allows non-technical people to compile text, illustrations, and video and audio clips onto an interactive computer CD-ROM. Her clients include the Ministry of Education in Ontario, a large pharmaceutical company and a financial institution.
Douglas is also a Christian. She attends Trinity Yorkdale Presbyterian Church. So she was excited to find a way to integrate her business and faith.
"I originally came to see that this has a business application for me," says Douglas. "But I also thought we could use this to teach the gospel. People today love to sit at their PC and use the tools that are there. If you talk about Abraham, you could show the geography of the region, give people a sense of the times, and link it to a Bible commentary."
The only problem is she can hardly give the software away.
Not that she hasn’t tried. She offered the $6,500 (per user) software package free to any Christian educational institute that wanted it. After sending out 40 letters of invitation to colleges in eastern Canada recently, she was surprised that only one, Tyndale College and Seminary in Toronto, accepted it.
Larry Willard, Tyndale’s vice-president of advancement, says they were grateful to receive the software and have already used it to develop some distance learning courses (CW, Jul 14/98).
Douglas remains a little puzzled by the hesitancy of colleges, but acknowledges that it takes a shift in thinking to go from lectures and a chalkboard to interactive multimedia on a computer.
Multimedia to the masses
Classified as "authoring" software, it is most often used to make an entire course available on one CD, which is then used as a distance educational tool.
Originally developed as a pilot project for the aerospace industry to train astronauts and ground crew, the software created a business opportunity for Douglas. She began selling the software to businesses who need a less expensive way to train their employees than gathering them for a seminar.
"We wrote [the software] so we could take multimedia training to the masses…you don’t have to be a programmer to use this software," says Douglas in a telephone interview from her Toronto home office.
The user can create hyperlinks from written course material to pictures, video lectures or audio interviews and even to relevant websites. The software, which runs in Windows 95 or MacIntosh operating systems, also allows interactive exams to be taken by computer (running off the CD) and then submitted electronically to the instructor.
Douglas says the advantage of the software is that users can go through the course material at home and use class time for discussion. She also says people who use multimedia tools retain up to 40 percent more than by traditional teaching methods.
