Blaise Training Courses
Westat has a team of trainers who have years of experience using and teaching Blaise in the U.S. and around the world. The courses combine lectures and demonstrations with practical, hands-on exercises that students work through at their own pace. Though programming experience is not required for the basic-level classes, students should be familiar with using computers and Windows®. Westat offers classes in Advanced Blaise 5 and Basic Blaise 4.8. Email Blaise@Westat.com for information on upcoming schedules.
Course Descriptions
Blaise Training Courses
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The Basic Blaise 5 Training is a 4-day course that gives new Blaise developers the information they need to produce multimode data collection instruments and run them in a production environment. The course is relevant for those working with computer-assisted interviews, including computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI), computer-assisted personal interviewing (CAPI), and computer-assisted self-interviewing (CASI) running on desktop, laptop, and mobile platforms. Basic Blaise 5 Training covers: overview of the Blaise system; overview of Blaise instrument development; state-of-the-art Blaise 5 Control Centre Efficiency features such as Intellisense, keyword highlighting, snippets, and context sensitive help; new language features such as ROLES, MODES, SPECIALANSWERS, and GROUPS; layout designer that allows screens to be viewed without running the instrument; a case study that includes the development of a Master Page, utilization of presented topics and conversion of source code and data from Blaise 4 to Blaise 5
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The Advanced Blaise 5 Training is a 4-day course in designing screen layouts. It is recommended for programmers with some Blaise 5 experience. The class provides the information and techniques to design sophisticated multimode data collection instruments and run them in a production environment. The course is relevant for those working with computer-assisted interviews, including computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI), computer-assisted personal interviewing (CAPI), and computer-assisted self-interviewing (CASI) running on desktop, laptop, and mobile platforms. Advanced Blaise 5 Training covers: Resource Editor Template Design Expressions Usage conditions for templates – ApplyAutomatically, ApplicabilityCondition, and ApplyAtRuntime Layout Sets Modes/Layout Set Groups Text Roles Promoting Input Controls and their properties
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The Basic Blaise 4.8 Training is a 4-day course that gives new Blaise developers the information they need to produce data collection instruments and run them in a production environment. The course is relevant for those working with computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI), computer-assisted personal interviewing (CAPI), and computer-assisted self-interviewing (CASI). Basic Blaise 4.8 Training covers: overview of the Blaise system; overview of Blaise instrument development; introduction to Blaise data models (data fields, execution rules, consistency checks, and creating new data types); further programming in Blaise (blocks, procedures, tables, and primary and secondary keys); developing instruments in a team environment (project-defined common blocks, standard type definitions, and development and testing of individual modules); introduction to advanced programming in Blaise (using external data models, coding for keyword searches, and lookup schemes) Introduction to the system tool Manipula; more advanced work with Manipula (initializing data files, selecting subsets of the data, linking multiple input data files, and writing reports0); working with Blaise metadata using the system tools Cameleon and Maniplus; overview of the Blaise CATI management system