Use of multiplatform CD-ROMs for disseminating supplementary learning materials in a pharmaceutical calculations course

American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education, Fall 1999 by Ramanathan, Murali

There was a substantial number of these replacements and these were spread over more than fifty files. The time required for making these simple, repetitive replacements was reduced significantly by carrying out the changes on the University Unix machines. A substitute-replace script that was kindly provided by the Computing Center was used. The script makes the substitutions in each file and directory within the working directory, thus eliminating the tedious steps of opening, editing and saving multiple files. I will make the script available to instructors who request it. The edited pages were downloaded to the Macintosh and their compatibility with the Netscape browser was examined to ensure that there were no broken links remaining. The total content of the files was approximately 1.8 megabytes. Finally, the main index file was opened and saved as Netscape file to ensure that the CD-ROM would open in browser window rather than prompt for a text editor or a word processing program.

CD-ROM Preparation. CD-ROM blanks in "crystal" cases were purchased from the University at Buffalo Microcomputer store (UB Micro) at a price of approximately $1.40. The revised and improved files were transferred to a CD-ROM using the CD-R recorder. The formatting options on the software driver, Toast, were set to ISO 9660, and the Macintosh file names option was enabled (ISO 9660 is a platform-independent international standard that describes the file structure for computer files so that CD-ROMs can be read on PC, Macintosh, and Unix). The total time required for preparing a single CD-ROM was approximately two minutes. The pilot CD-ROM prepared on the Macintosh PowerPC was then tested for compatibility with the device drivers on computers running Windows 95, Windows 95, Windows NT and Windows 3.11 operating systems (All from Microsoft Corp., Bellevue, WA). The CD-ROM was compatible with all the operating systems except Windows 3.11.

After this trial, 25 additional CD-ROMs were prepared and distributed to students with home computers with a request that they provide feedback regarding any difficulties. When these first users did not report any difficulties, the remaining 100 CD-ROMs were prepared. Every tenth CD was tested on the internal CD-ROM drive on the Macintosh PowerPC to ensure quality. Brief instruction adhesive labels were prepared on a laser printer and pasted on the case. Since CD-ROMs can get separated from their cases, many mastering service provide the option of printing information directly on the CDs. However, because the Ricoh CD-ROM blanks were a distinctive gold color and provided clearly defined areas for marking both the title and data content, the choice of how to mark/label the CD-ROM was left to the discretion of the individual student. The CD-ROMs were distributed free to students who had purchased the course handout. No significant complaints regarding the CD-ROMs were noted by the students.

The two problems that precluded reading the CD-ROM on computers running the Windows 3.11 operating system were some long file names and an incompatible CD-ROM format. To prepare CD-ROMs with Windows 3.11 compatibility, the length of long file names was reduced to less than eight characters with a three-character extension. The links corresponding to these altered files were altered using the find-replace script. Additionally, the format setting on Toast was changed "MS-DOS and Joliet" (Joliet File System is a CD-ROM specification based on the ISO 9660 standard that was created by the Microsoft Corp. Joliet supports long filenames and directory names and is compatible with Windows 95). After a pilot test indicated compatibility, a total of five CD-ROMs were prepared for students using the Windows 3.11 system.