The TEMPO Courseware Tool

Courseware development tools have usually been expensive necessities for the learning and development department. Many tools are priced per courseware author and often cost in the thousands of dollars per seat. Some actually charge per learner as well which can add up to tens of thousands of additional dollars. In addition, many vendors charge annual maintenance fees for the tools. In my experience, these costs can be quite substantial.

Globecomm’s TEMPO approach changes all that. You can use Microsoft PowerPoint® as your courseware authoring tool, a software tool that’s ubiquitous in most organizations. That means that your marginal cost for courseware authoring is zero. So those friendly little ppt files can be your courseware files as well.

If you don’t happen to have PowerPoint® available in your shop, I still have good news for you; I have tried TEMPO with OpenOfficeTM Impress files and it works well. It is available as a free download at www.openoffice.org . Since, Impress is an open source product, your courseware development tool investment can be exactly zero when you use TEMPO.

Of course, many products claim to be able to use PowerPoint presentations as input to their courseware system. But TEMPO takes it a step further. Not only are you creating your slides in PowerPoint®, but you can create your quizzes as ppt files as well.

So how does that work, you ask?

Those clever engineers at Globecomm have come up with a easy to use coding scheme. To signal to TEMPO that you want a slide to be a quiz, you just insert a text string such as %Q. at the beginning of the slide title. You label answers with similar short little tags. You specify distractors in the same way. It’s simple and straight forward. The same coding scheme works for both interactive live broadcasts and interactive, on-demand modules.

So you already have your TEMPO courseware authoring tool – and you already know how to use it!

Rick Darby
Rick Darby is President of SEDATA, LLC , consultants specializing in video-centric Interactive Distance Learning and technology-based training.