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3.
Developer Skills Requirements
An important consideration, possibly the most important consideration in some cases, when choosing an
authoring tool is the training and expertise required to use the tool. No matter how powerful the tool, if
the author needs several years of specialist experience to produce a usable application then that tool may
not be suitable. Alternatively, the author may decide that a specialist should be employed to undertake or
oversee certain aspects of the development. In the case of larger scale projects, it is useful for project
managers and programming leads to know a tool's skill requirements ahead of appointing staff.
The skills required to develop in ToolBook can be divided into three broad areas which are common to
all applications. These are listed below and discussed in the following sections.
• Programming
• Graphic Design
• HCI (Human Computer Interaction)
This is by no means an exclusive list and other areas could be added including project management,
testing, systems analysis, media production and so on. Also, domain specific skills (e.g. economics,
physics, biology, etc.) are required at some point to develop computer based learning software. However,
these excluded skills requirements are either independent of ToolBook and would be just the same for
any other authoring system, and/or too specialised for the intended readership of this report.
3.1.
Programming
Despite inferences to the contrary in the Asymetrix publicity and product information, most ToolBook
applications development requires programming, or scripting as Asymetrix prefer to call it, to a greater
or lesser degree. While it is possible to create pages (i.e. screens) and populate them with objects such as
buttons, scrolling lists and graphics, in order to add functionality to these requires the use of the built in
"scripting" language called OpenScript. ToolBook's OpenScript, despite its name, is a full blown
programming language and to use ToolBook 3.0 effectively OpenScript programming is required.
3.1.1.
How much OpenScript coding is required for different types of project?
This is a difficult question to answer as there are numerous ways of implementing exactly the
same functionality but with varying levels of "ease of development", robustness, complexity,
maintainability and so on. For instance, the script controlling a menu screen consisting of a
series of navigation buttons could be implemented as a series of independent self-contained
objects. Such a bottom up approach requires a lot of coding, but much of it is very similar.
Alternatively, a generalisation could be made and the code could be factored up to a higher
level of abstraction so that a single script controlled all the buttons. This abstracted approach
requires less scripting but the script is more complex. A further approach still would be develop
a reusable component consisting of a set of navigation buttons which could be used in this and
any future book. Here, more coding is required to make the buttons independent and
generalised. So, clearly, the amount of coding required for different types of projects is entirely
dependant on the precise nature of the project.
However, some generalisations can be made. Reference materials and, so called, electronic page
turning applications require relatively little coding although, when implemented by
inexperienced ToolBook programmers, will consist of numerous cut and pasted copies of
TLTP Economics Consortium • A Critical Evaluation of Multimedia ToolBook - A SIMA Report • 9 May 96 • Page 12