OMV CD-ROM

Teaching material

The starting point of the CD-ROM project was the discrepancy between existing teaching options and the nature of the content to be taught in schools. By 2004, technical equipment used in Austrian schools had steadily improved ("laptop classes"), but high-grade content was practically non-existent. School resources dealing with mineral oil and natural gas were obsolete. A CD-ROM was devised to supply information in a contemporary form. After comprehensive photographic research, around 150 pages of text and hundreds of graphics and animations were produced in cooperation with 50 experts from OMV. In order to create a product that was perfectly tailored to the target group, a team of teachers and pupils was invited to participate in the project. Finally, the CD-ROM was approved by the Federal Ministry for Education, Arts and Culture as a teaching aid and subsequently handed out to all new recruits to OMV as well to inform them about their workplace. A glossary containing more than 250 definitions provides information on unfamiliar terms and concepts at the click of a mouse. In order to make numbers that are difficult to conceive (such as "a hundred million tonnes of crude oil") easier to grasp, a calculator was developed that breaks them down into manageable units using images such as bathtubs full to the brim, boiled eggs and the length of tank trains. A special tool for lessons and presentations was developed for creating individual screen sequences covering every aspect of the content. In order to help users access the enormous quantity of graphics, animations, videos and photos and make them available for further use, a media library was created, enabling direct download of all media in high-definition quality to the local computer. A notebook is available for storing texts for further use, with options for immediate direct editing and comments. Since so much data changes every year, an automatic update feature has been added for downloading updated texts, statistics and media from an OMV server to the local computer, or burning them onto a new CD-ROM. A re-edited English version of the CD-ROM was released in 2011.