On-line tutorials under UNIX

[WMartin at office-3]

From:  Will Martin <WMartin at office-3>

As part of our UNIX-based workplace automation effort, we want to
have some form of on-line tutorial training in the specific tools
we are building, and, perhaps later, some on-line general UNIX
training.

We have seen (and have acquired) the audiodigital tape training
system from User Training Corp.  [In case you haven't seen this
at a USENIX conference or the like, this is a cassette tape
player that you put into the RS232 line between your terminal and
host or modem.  The cassette is stereo; one track is audio which
you listen to over headphones, the other is digital and contains
data which appears on the terminal screen.  So you can be walked
through a session by voice and see the activity on the screen.
You can interrupt the training tape and interact directly with
your own computer for examples during a training session.]

Anyway, since it is somewhat of a hassle to have these tapes
customized for training people in our own software systems, we
want to have a "Tutor" tool that will walk the user through the
operation of a piece of software, controlling what the user sees
but also allowing him/her to really run the tool and see the
results.

It may be possible to do this with a fairly simple shell script;
I thought at first of a series of "cat" commands, printing out
screens of instructions or examples, interspersed with "if" or
"case" statements which would allow the user to skip around or
back-up in the session, and calls to the programs themselves so
the trainee can run examples.

However, this doesn't give much control over what the user sees
and does; what we would really like is some software package that
would sit between the user and the system being demonstrated,
present information to the trainee, run the system using
pre-determined data and show the user the results, and generally
act as an automated teacher.  I'm not expecting anything very
complicated in terms of this package interpreting the user's
input; some sort of dialog on the level of "go on", "quit", "go
back to screen 5", etc.  is as complex as I think we'll need.
Does anyone know of anything like this that is available and will
run under 4.something BSD?  It sounds like something one of the
academic UNIX sites would have put together long ago for bringing
up novice users, but maybe that's a rash assumption...

Regards, Will Martin