APPENDIX B.8 : WINECON LECTURER: THE WINECON CMS

The WinEcon software consists of around a thousand self contained topics covering the entire first year introductory economics degree syllabus. Each topic consists of one or more pages of teaching material and are the atomistic units of courseware from which WinEcon courses are constructed. A course is constructed by grouping topics together into sections, each section having a lecturer-definable introduction, summary and assessment. Sections in turn are grouped into chapters and chapters into courses.

WinEcon is supplied with a number of predefined courses. These include:

Each of these courses is a path through a subset of the pool of topics. However, using the WinEcon Lecturer CMS a lecturer can rearrange, add to or remove topics from this path. Indeed, it is a simple matter to create an entirely new course: Economics for Engineers for example, with its own set of chapters, sections and topics plus accompanying introductions and summaries.

However, the course structure is only one aspect of the 'pick and mix' ideal. WinEcon Lecturer also gives lecturers access to the glossary, references, questions, tests and exams which appear throughout the WinEcon teaching material. In addition, the lecturer may customise the features and behaviour of the system by clicking on radio and check buttons in WinEcon Lecturer's Configuration screens. Finally, the CMS allows the lecturer to keep track of students' and classes' use of WinEcon and their performance in tests through a series of reports and audit trails which function entirely transparently of the 'pick and mix' structure of the course in question.

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WinEcon: Figure 1. In WinEcon Lecturer, the lecturer can design a course by grouping together topics into sections and chapters

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WinEcon: Figure 2. WinEcon student login allows the student to select from a number of lecturer defined courses

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