MALTED - a shared experience

Abstract

The story of MALTED (Multimedia Authoring for Language Tutors and Educational Development) (www.malted.org) goes back a few years to the acceptance by the European Commission of the MALTED project for European Commission funding under the Educational Multimedia Task Force programme. The result is the appearance of the MALTED authoring system as freeware, available to all under a GNU agreement. The appearance of the MALTED2 version has resulted from considerable post-project development work by the Spanish Ministry of Education (CNICE - Educational Information and Communications Technology Unit).
This article will examine how the system addresses the points discovered in the needs analysis and trialling phases of the project, which have contributed to the creation of the most powerful language authoring tool to appear so far. It will also explain how the system has been introduced and disseminated, especially in Spain, and finally will explain varied examples of applications created using the tool.