Eskom, with the largest number of MicroStation seats in Africa have adopted SofTutor for MicroStation/J 2D and MicroStation/J 3D for its in-house training programme.

As with all large companies in South Africa, Eskom is going through a period of rationalisation to become more cost-efficient and currently introducing schemes to make the government-owned company into self-contained independent profit making units. One of the main drains on its budget is the amount of money required to send new MicroStation users on four or five day courses to learn Micro-Station at an outside company. This can lead to major problems as each individual student absorbs information at the lectures at different levels. Quite often a group of six students can be hindered by one student who finds it difficult to grasp the necessary information fast enough to keep in pace with the lecturer and subsequently will hold the whole learning process back until a command or function is mastered. This can lead to frustration and general friction within the group resulting in not completing the whole course or no time to work on examples at the end of the course.

Using the SofTutor method these problems are eliminated as the users are fully in charge of the amount of information they can absorb within a period of time and the CD-ROM allows the users to go back 10-20 s or re-run the clip completely if the command is not mastered during the first viewing. The CD is fully interactive and the user and trainer can load the same file if SofTutor is running within MicroStation and closed down to a window. The user has visual and oral feedback from the trainer and as he shows the command or function on his screen the student follows on the MicroStation screen thus making the complete learning process fully interactive.

SofTutor does not require MicroStation to run on a PC and a student can use it full screen if the main program is not present.

New Vision, the developer of SofTutor, has recently introduced a scheme whereby users can purchase a one, two, three or seven-day licence to run SofTutor, thus eliminating the overhead of having the overall cost of SofTutor not being utilised when training is not required. To re-activate the CD, a new licence can be purchased for the time required thus introducing a use-as-needed training scheme.

Galilee Engineering Services

083 266 7396

www.galilee.co.za