Concept: Course Sections versus Course Guide
Think of a college course that meets
twice a week for lecture and presentations and also has a course textbook. With
FlexTraining, the Course Content sections are the lectures, and the Course
Guide is the textbook.
Can they be identical? Yes, but they
probably shouldn’t be. If you took a course and were merely instructed to read
the textbook and take the tests, you might feel a bit slighted.
On the other hand, there may be
situations where a Course Guide may be nothing more than a few pages of
technical details or supplemental material. That would be an example of a
one-chapter Course Guide. The Course Guide may have fewer chapters than the
number of Course Sections, or more, or the same number.
If you plan to use audio, video or
other high-tech material in the course, it probably belongs in the Course
Section content rather than the Course Guide. A Course Guide should be more of
a reference, something that is not always accessed sequentially.
If you keep the Course Guide to text
and simple images, you can create a single-file word-processed document
containing the guide, and FlexTraining will make it available for download from
the Student Menu.
You should identify or build your Course Guide chapters or
documents before continuing. These pages or documents may reside on your
server, or anywhere on the Internet or your Intranet.
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Training
Another benefit is facilitating regional integration. By conforming to a regional architecture—we haven't talked too much about architecture yet that is standards based—agencies will be able to communicate with each other. Okay. It's back to my home theater analogy again. Home electronic systems have become networked with other systems in your household. Now with the proper connections your computer can talk, if you will, to your TV and your TV can communicate with the Internet.
You may even, like myself, use a mobile application on my smartphone or tablet to program your digital video recorder while you're at the beach or on vacation. "Oh, I was gonna record that program and I forgot to do it before I left." I can open up an application on my iPhone and send the command to my recorder to record it. Perhaps even more analogous is playing a video game, say for example on your whatever—Wii console perhaps with someone in another location. So I can, if somebody else has that same gaming system and you agree to hook up through the Internet, we can actually play a game against each other.
In our transportation world, this occurs when various agencies and jurisdictions can communicate with each other about say the status of the transportation network. Missed communication can be reduced when jurisdictions use the same standards. For example, when reporting an incident on a freeway, it would be very important to know whether it involved a bus, for example, say versus a car. A bus is likely going to require a higher level of medical personnel to respond. Now if one of your systems codes a bus as a number four, for example, in the database and another system, which is not using standards uses a four to define a motorcycle, that may likely cause a problem in sending the correct response team.
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