Apple announce iTeach tutoring software

No, not really. That's just April 1st shorthand for my point.

Peter suggests an interactive drawing tutor as a great application for the TabletPC, a more dignified concept than my "Draw Draw Revolution" game. He suggests text and a voice-over, simple animation, some way of evaluating the learner's input, etc...

I was struck by the thought that there's no commodity tutorial-building software. There's Authorware, but Macromedia doesn't even put that on the front page of their Website anymore and it costs \$3000. Meanwhile, we live in PowerPoint Nation. The last time I looked at Authorware (admittedly, probably 3 years ago) it seemed little more than PowerPoint with test-building tools. My adventures in educational software led to my conviction that evaluation is a very significant part of education (a pretty amazing conversion for someone who spent untold hours giving and attending professional conferences: when was the last time you took a test at a seminar?). Of course, one can build a tutorial in HTML or Flash or PowerPoint or C# or assembly language, but what I'm getting at is that surely there's a market for software dedicated to tutorial design.

And here's the thing: it has to be designed by great teachers and built by great programmers.