CourseReader

CourseReader is a program developed by the International Training Center of the International  Labor Organization and the Telelearning NCE, Canada for use in training and continuing education around the world. The development of the program was motivated at first by problems with telephone company policies outside the US . Most of these companies charge local calls by the minute and in developing countries phone service is not always reliable. These are significant obstacles to participation in online educational programs. Students need software that allows them to download waiting messages quickly, to write their responses offline and then upload their messages.

With this background in mind, Marc Belanger of the ILO and Linda Harasim of the Telelearning NCE set out to design an innovative offline newsreader for ILO members. The result is CourseReader, an elegant solution to a number of problems faculty and students experience in online education. In addition to allowing offline work, CourseReader simplifies a number of administrative tasks associated with online education. CourseReader is an open source product available in a Beta version. Faculty interested in the experimenting with new approaches to online education are encouraged to try it. For more information and contacts, refer to The CourseReader Homepage 

The basic version of TextWeaver draws on considerable portions of CourseReader's open source code. TextWeaver is also an offline newsreader in this early stage, however, it offers many features that are not included in CourseReader such as keywording, filing, and various forms of hyperlinking messages.

 The major reason for drawing on CourseReader code for TextWeaver development has less to do with phone line charges than with the desire to use a standard server, such as a news server, so that interested faculty can initiate testing without having to rely on their system administrator to install new software on university computers. We are grateful to the developers of CourseReader for having made their program open source. 

Beyond this overlap in code and common open source strategy, it is not yet clear how the relationship between these two programs will develop. CourseReader is a simple and elegant program. The new features of TextWeaver make it more complex. They will have to be tested extensively to determine if they are sufficiently useful to justify the complexity and to identify the types of courses for which they are best suited.  Faculty can get a sense of where CourseReader and TextWeaver are pointing the field by trying them out and reporting their findings.