Multimedia Lesson Builder

Multimedia Lesson Builder (MMLB) is a tool created by the University of Wisconsin, Madison to help non-technical instructors create media-rich, portable online educational tools to supplement their teaching. The link is http://engage.wisc.edu/projects/MmLessonBuilder/. Basically, the user can create a lesson that involves text, audio, images and video, along with various types of evaluations such as matching, drag and drop, multiple choice, etc.; said evaluations can use not only text, but also audio and images in virtually any combination. It uses a system of templates combined with fairly good as-you-go instructions to make it easier for the user to learn it, although there are still some confusing or complicated parts for the first-time user. However, given how quickly it can be learned, the potential gains both from instructor creativity and freeing up programmer time can be significant. Tom Hinnebusch in Lunguistics and Zilungi Sosibo (formerly in Linguistics) have been using it to develop a set of Zulu language resources; once those go online, then I’ll link to them, as well.