ABSTRACT
Objective: In recent years, educators have increasingly adopted e-learning. Unfortunately, most e-courseware or Computer-Aided Instruction (CAI) could not always fulfill educators’ needs. This results in a need to develop their own e-courseware by using available electronic authoring tools; however, there are difficulties in using these tools. The present study was intended to research the difficulties of using authoring tools and to identify features needed by educators; the results were used to develop the innovative CAIBuilder software. Methods: The waterfall model, human-computer interaction and object-action interface model have been used for designing and implementing the CAIBuilder. The software was written with ToolBook OpenScriptฎ. The beta version was tested, bugs were fixed and additional features were coded. The final version was used to conduct two workshops for 53 non-programmer university educators. Pre-test and post-test questionnaires were distributed to collect demographic data, knowledge, concepts, skills, experience, and confidence on creating multimedia applications; and key features of CAIBuilder. Results: The results were analyzed and presented in percentages, and the Wilcoxon signed rank test was used for comparison. The results demonstrated that over 85% of non-programmer educators found CAIBuilder was user-friendly, easy to learn, but yet powerful. The Wilcoxon signed rank test at a significant level p < 0.0001 indicated that, after the CAIBuilder workshops, over 80% of participants had increased their knowledge and confidence in creating multimedia applications by themselves, creating computerized test items, navigational controls and program flows. The Autonomic Nervous System and Physical Modalities are two examples of interactive e-courseware implemented by using CAIBuilder and they have been currently used for teaching physiology and physiotherapy to medical students at the Faculty of Medicine, Siriraj Hospital. Conclusions: CAIBuilder was an innovative electronic authoring tool of choice for non-programmer authors to create good quality and interactive e-courseware with feedback in a reasonably quick time frame without programming.