Section 5 Content creation step-by-step guides

CourseGenie: Generating an interactive set of course materials from one Word document

  1. Start Word and open (File > Open) the information sheet File management located in the CC_content folder on the CD-ROM accompanying this pack. This is an adaptation of the ‘File management’ information sheet from Section 7 ‘Technical know-how’, and you are going to create an interactive version of this content.
  2. Start courseGenie by selecting Tools courseGenie > Start courseGenie.

You should now have a new drop-down item on the menu bar next to Help, entitled courseGenie.

Notice that the formatting previously applied to the document has changed. This is because you will be using styles from the courseGenie style sheet while the program is running. If you were to stop courseGenie running (Tools > courseGenie > Stop courseGenie), your original formatting would be reinstated.

  1. Before editing the document, you need to add some metadata. This is information about the course that can be used by IMS-compliant course management systems, and which is stored with the Word document when it is saved. It is also possible to export the metadata separately to use it for several documents.


Select courseGenie > Metadata to open the Metadata dialog box.

Figure 1: Metadata dialog box

Select the Description tab and enter the title ‘File management module’ for the course materials. This title will be displayed at the top of each generated HTML page as the course title.

All other metadata items are optional depending on your own requirements. Explore the tabs and options and make any other entries you require then click OK to exit the Metadata dialog box.

  1. Because you have specified ‘File management module’ as the main title in the Metadata field, you do not want the heading on your document to be displayed when you convert it to HTML. You could just delete the heading from the document, but you might want to retain it to use the Word version for another purpose. Using courseGenie’s cgComment style, you can annotate any content in the source Word document which will then be ignored when you convert it to HTML.

To use cgComment, move the ‘File management’ heading down two lines then highlight it and click on the Style option icon on the formatting bar. Notice that courseGenie has added its own styles into the standard Word style menu. (See step 15 of ‘CourseGenie: Creating popups’ for a definition of all the courseGenie styles.)

All courseGenie styles are prefixed with cg and are colour coded both in the style option list and within your source Word document. This makes it easy to see at a glance which styles you have applied to your content.


Select cgComment and your title will now be displayed in italics within a box, as shown for the cgComment option in the style menu. Now insert the word ‘Introduction’ above this comment, which will be the first section heading.

Figure 2: Style options from the formatting bar

  1. Now you are going to mark the section headings in the file management document so that when it is converted to HTML it will divide into separate pages, each with a title.

Highlight the heading ‘Introduction’ and apply the cgPageTitle style.

  1. Scroll through your document and repeat step 5 for the following section headings:

Path

Viewing your file structure

Selecting files or folders

Formatting disks

Creating new folders

Copying files or folders

Moving files or folders

Renaming files or folders

Deleting files or folders

The recycle bin

Searching for files and folders

Note: if your document contained sub-headings, then applying the cgSubHeading style would only affect the formatting of heading, and not start a new page as well.

  1. To see the effect of applying the cgPageTitle style, save the document to a folder called coursegenie on your floppy disk, then select courseGenie > Generate course.

A Browse for folder dialog box will open. Browse to the folder you have just created, select it and click OK.


A series of dialog boxes will be displayed showing the progress of the conversion of the Word document to XML, and the conversion of the XML file to HTML pages. The final dialog box shows a complete list of pages generated, with the message HTML generated OK. If the error message HTML files were not generated is displayed, then return to your document and check that you have made the appropriate amendments correctly.

Figure 3: CourseGenie HTML generate and preview dialog box

  1. Ensure that Preview in Browser is checked then click on Close.

Your browser should open and you should be able to see your document converted into a complete set of course materials in HTML pages.

When you generate your course, all the files will be put into a subfolder within the folder you selected above. The subfolder will be named after your source Word document, and a zipped version of this folder will also be created to enable easy export.

To see the files and folders generated by courseGenie, open My Computer or Windows Explorer and navigate to the folder you created on your floppy disk.

Note: when content is saved, any previous version with the same name will be overwritten. If you want to retain a copy of a previous version of a generated course, rename your source Word document before generating the new version of the course.


  1. CourseGenie has automatically created a table of contents which appears on every page and a set of navigation buttons which appear at the top and bottom of every page. To change the width of the column for the table of contents and to determine whether navigation buttons and the index page are included, return to your Word document and select courseGenie > Settings.

Figure 4: CourseGenie settings dialog box

Select the Content tab and amend the settings as required.

If you select the Footer option located under the General tab your footer will be added to every page of the courseGenie materials. For this example, enter ‘Adapted from the file management information sheet from the E-Guides training programme.’ to reference your source materials.

  1. To make the paragraph near the beginning of the document which begins ‘Note: this section deals with…’ stand out more, highlight the entire paragraph and apply the cgPanelText style. This will put a grey panel behind the text.
  2. The list of common file extensions on pages 1 and 2, within the section headed Path, might look better displayed in a box. Highlight the list and apply the cgBoxText style.

Note: page breaks in Word will be ignored during course generation, so it is possible to still use them to help make the source Word document more readable.

  1. Save your document and generate the course (see step 7 above) to see the effects of these changes.


E-Guides training programme