Peng, Ph.d. Senior Physics Cai Courseware

Courseware, the soul of Computer Assisted Instruction (CM), embodies the educational thoughts and the teaching levels of designers, which directly has impact on the success of CAL. Up to now, research and study for CAL courseware are boomed up, both education institutions and commercial computer companies have taken their efforts. Though numerous courseware in the market now, none of them has a great impact in China, this situation make us have a reflective thinking about it. A helpfiul courseware for teaching is determined crucially by educational thoughts and teaching approach implied in the courseware, although it may be affected by the techniques of design and levels of courseware users. Recently, education scholars have focused on the study of theory for courseware that is lack of positive methods; that is, a detailed analysis on the commercial courseware is few concerned. An attempt of this paper is to explore the success and the drawback of a commercial courseware, Pengboshi Physics CAL Courseware for Senior Schools, on the basis of learning theory, and supply the lesson for the designer抯 courseware. This paper is mainly concerned with type of courseware, construction of courseware, model of courseware, components of courseware including presentation of teaching 桰? information, control of teaching process, interaction of computer and users as well online help. I find that Pengboshi Physics Courseware has no execution the advantage of CAL really due to short of cognition of learning theory and application by my analysis. The whole courseware just looks like an electronic textbook, which is common disadvantage among almost courseware of the same kind. Combined with the trend of CAL in our country, I try to make some considerations for CAL and give two suggestions; The first place, I propose that courseware doesn抰 transplant simply the ordinary rationale, the design for a good courseware should integrate computer techniques into learning theory, and secondly the trend of courseware should go forward to 揑ntegrableware?way open and flexibly.