A short history of MILE McMaster University has been using drill style courseware in language classes since our first experiments in 1986 under the direction of Dr. Samuel Cioran. The mcBOOKmaster environment is simple, robust, will work on almost all well behaved DOS computers, can be used to create printed documentation, and can be distributed easily with lessons on a single diskette. With it, instructors at McMaster and elsewhere, have created numerous titles for French, Italian, Russian, Linguistics, and German. One of its great strengths was that instructors could create materials easily without learning an authoring environment. They could use their word-processors to create their lessons.
Many instructors now expect to be able to build multimedia exercises.
This means that one cannot make mcBOOKmaster lessons available over the Internet or on a Macintosh. For this reason we set out to create a successor to mcBOOKmaster that kept its good features and basic paradigm while moving to a more functional markup language. Unlike mcBOOKmaster, in MILE the MML script is run through a Lesson Builder that then creates the courseware. The Lessons can then be modified and enhanced by a programmer, should that be needed. It also means we can have different Lesson Builders for different platforms or purposes.