Simplified Authoring for Instructors using Distance Education (SAIDE)

This paper presents an alternative to current authoring methods for use in distance education. Several commercially available distance-education authoring tools are briefly discussed and an alternative, SAIDE (Simplified Authoring for Instructors using Distance Education), is presented. The discussion focuses on how SAIDE´s easy-to-use feature set is useful to authors/trainers in a non-traditional learning/training environment. The technical aspects discussed include details about the user interface and the ways that key features are linked from the interface to the server. The design includes feature interaction, clickable textures, buttons, and boxes, and the user interface paradigm shift from the current authoring methods to a simpler and more intuitive structure. The thrust is to focus on a fully developed and interactive distance education experience via a tool that is simple enough for a novice at using software applications and still powerful enough for a skillful practitioner in distance education.