About Smart

Smart is a collaborative approach to the production and delivery of training in quantitative methods via the World Wide Web. The training is primarily focused on persons with some experience of basic statistical principles who wish to familiarise themselves with one of the newer, or more specialist techniques which they believe may be useful in their work.

The primary aims are to help users to :

• Understand quickly the essence of a technique;
• Evaluate its usefulness in their work;
• Apply the method using software package(s);
• Find references for further study;
• Make contacts with experts by email links;
• Record their experience so as to improve the module.

To really understand a technique one must first get 'hands-on' experience. Smart provides links to application software to help the user to explore a technique. There are three ways in which this is done :

• the instructions are provided for running an application program e.g. SAS, Minitab, Genstat, along with the example data. These instructions can be copied from the browser and pasted to the user's own computer for running locally with the application software;
• in some cases the application program, e.g. written in C or Fortran, and located on the host server, can be run from the browser and the results displayed in the Web pages;
• if the application is written in Java or JavaScript then the user can interact directly with the software to explore, for example, the effects of various parameter settings on a model.

Smart can operate on stand-alone PCs as well as via the Internet or an Intranet.

Pages can be accessed using standard WWW browsers, e.g. Netscape 3.0+, Internet Explorer 3.0+.

The level of access can be adjusted to suit the user's environment. For example, where sound is provided within a module, it is possible to view, instead, a text version of the spoken word.