The talk will look at the consequences and potential outcomes of current attempts to produce Reusable Courseware. At the moment courseware reuse largely exists as a result of three independant forces : (i) the production of national and internaltional standards for the description and production of educational materials; (ii) the output of various research projects looking at technical solutions to courseware reuse, and (iii) extensions to OO software production techniques and markup schemes.
The talk will ask how such attempts at standardisation map onto the kinds of reusable courseware that has already been developed. More generally, it will be an opportunity to discuss the embedded assumptions, strengths and shortcomings on these approaches to creating a grand unified markup scheme for educational materials.
I have been involved in two related research projects on 'Vicarious Learning' (ESRC) and 'Developing Tertiary Courseware' (EPSRC). A central part of which involved analysis, in both field and expt trials, of various CMC discussion platforms and discourse tasks. A physical output from the project has been an indexed database of problem centred discussions between students, Dissemination. Each discussion is centred around a defined problem task (hence the name, Task Directed Discussions, or TDDs) which is then used as one of the indexing properties to this multimedia database from a set of course notes.
While our projects have been interested in capturing and reusing discourse, other projects have been more concerned with creating re-usable coursewaork notes. A local example would be the MANTCHI project (SHEFC) that has produced a set of ATOMs, or Autonomous Teaching Objects for the MANTCHI. Similarly, an initiative under the European Multimedia Taskforce called SIMULAB, has been developing techniques to generate, capture and re-use simulations in educational settings. Again, there is now a JISC initiative, at De Montford University, to look at generic, domain independent avenues for courseware reuse (SoURCE - Software Use, Reuse and Customisation in Education) and in particular, that which may be developed and disseminated within the construction industries (BEATL).
More widely there has been a strong move nationally (IMS - Instructional Management System) and internationally (IEEE, ADL, AIII, etc...) to develop materials and models of learners and educational courseware in-line with emerging schemes for an 'Educational Object Economy.' Again, these standards are concerning with increasing the potential for co-operation and software/courseware re-use in educational settings.