Four hundred megabytes of material later, I had and successfully kept ahead of the course material for the full 16 weeks. The following term I did nearly the same thing with the freshman course, World Geography, which I presented in a large lecture hall. To summarize, students claimed to enjoy the lectures more, understand concepts better, find the class more interesting, take better notes, attend more regularly, and remain conscious longer. To date, I have used Podium only for class lectures and not for kiosks, for testing tools, for automatic demon- strations, or for any other of its intended purposes. Multimedia course materials demand rigorous organization, although their use can be quite flexible.
Podium lends itself well to top-down hierarchical development.
In a typical lecture one might present several main topics and then follow each, branching into sub-areas and giving examples as necessary. Pages can have any number of links and each link can move in any direction, so the user is not locked into a linear sequence for viewing. This as-needed page creation does not require the user to know the entire lesson plan in advance, but a good rough outline is essential. The author an trim or append branches as time goes on, with no limits as to the size or complexity of the entire network. Assuming the graphics files exist, linking them in any of these ways takes about as long as one needs to read this sentence.