Dr Peter Sefton [HREF7] , NextEd Ltd [HREF8], mailto:peter.sefton@nexted.com.
This paper explores the publishing and management of course materials across multiple modes of delivery, including delivery to semi-autonomous education centres located away from the main campuses of major institutions. We look at two approaches to getting course materials on the web. One, which is close to classroom practice and commonly implemented in Learning Management Systems, we call the ‘handout’ model. The other is more similar to the distance education approach of preparing publications for distribution by mail, which we call a ‘publishing’ model, where standardisation and structure are valued. We comment on why we see the latter approach as important for distributed delivery.
“Distributed learning”(Oblinger 1999) is an approach to distance education that blends online, classroom and traditional distance education. This paper explores the publishing and management of materials across multiple modes of delivery, including delivery to semi-autonomous education centres located away from the main campuses of major institutions.
As a service provider to several educational providers working in a variety of modes, NextEd Pty Ltd is in a position to observe a variety of approaches to courseware publishing and materials management. To assist these clients we have assembled a collection of business processes, and created some software in a system known as the “Continuous Publishing System” or CPS.
We start by providing a simple bipolar characterisation of approaches to courseware management, and then discuss some of the processes we have created and observed in client organisations, concluding with a list of issues that must be addressed for publishing in a truly distributed learning environment.
On one hand we have the handout approach to courseware, on the other the publishing model.
The handout approach is typified by the rudimentary publishing systems built into Learning Management Systems such as Blackboard [HREF1]. This system allows ad-hoc upload of course material by lecturers, as primary objects in the system. The resulting courseware is typically not hyperlinked, and may consist of a collection of proprietary application files, typically Microsoft Office documents, or PDF documents. We call this a ‘handout’ approach because of its similarity to the practice of distributing discrete sets of lecture notes at each class, in face-to-face teaching.
The handout model is usually accompanied by a lack of content standardisation, so it can be rapidly rolled out to large groups of people. That is, vendors are able to claim that as authoring is done using standard tools such as Microsoft Office, there is no need to change any process or practice within the organisation, and that rollout does not require very much training. The costs for creating and managing material can be ignored, and the opportunity cost of not creating a more standardised, linked web experience for learners never calculated. These costs may in fact be substantial but are difficult to measure, even if there is the inclination to do so.
In a publishing model there is a set of organisation-wide standards that apply to materials delivery. These standards can be applied in two ways. In distance-education specialist institutions they are typically implemented by a distance education centre, an instructional/web design group or similar editorial group. In other cases they may be implemented in the form of a distributed authoring system, where templates or schemas are supported by some kind of business or IT system.
Amongst NextEd’s customers there are some of the former, and very few examples of the latter. While template systems are common they usually lack the systemic infrastructure to support broad scale automation of publishing and thus usage and compliance tends to be patchy. There are also blends of the two approaches in use across our client base, and even a case where a highly disciplined publishing house targeting off campus learners co-exists with ad-hoc delivery for classroom based courses.
An example of a publishing approach, par excellence, is the University of Southern Queensland’s GOOD system, which uses a detailed, pedagogically informed XML Document Type Definition (DTD) (Taylor 2001). Materials prepared in XML using the GOOD system can be automatically rendered to many different output formats. This system promises to deliver significant benefits to the organisation, with the associated costs of a complex rollout to deal with first. The GOOD team report satisfactory results so far, in the early stages of campus-wide adoption.
It is no accident that an ad hoc handout approach is taken by major Learning Management System vendors, and most open projects. Software that requires too much rolling out, or is subject to customisation is difficult to sell, and ‘we support uploading any format’ looks better on a brochure than ‘we need to work with you to standardise your materials’.
This has lead to the situation where un-customised major Learning Management System systems do not suit distance education institutions, which wish to have published (i.e. coherent and inter-linked) materials rather than unlinked handouts.
There is frequently tension within institutions between the organisation, which may wish to exert control, and see themselves as publishers, and teaching staff wishing to minimise their workload and/or control their own material.
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Institutional Goals |
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As a private services provider, our role is not to influence the blend of the above that gets built into a business process; it is to assist organisations in choosing a materials management and publishing model that complements their goals.
There are two dimensions to consider, the technical and the people/process oriented. We present here the technical view, with notes on the processes needed to support them, and the conditions under which it makes sense to choose them.
One thing we will not discuss here is any kind of ad-hoc model, (for example web sites and Learning Management Systems scattered throughout a university) as this is not typical of our client base.
Some organisations tend to put their effort into creating ‘hand crafted’ web sites for courses to some kind of corporate standards. This is a ‘publishing’ approach. That is, it is quality oriented and subject to enterprise level standards.
This approach virtually dictates a dedicated group to create, as the level of rigour required to match a web site to a Learning Management System environment and create a consistent interface is not easily taught to end-user authors, although there are exceptional individuals.
NextEd has created a proprietary schema for web sites, (External Courseware Management) which provides standard entry points for Blackboard Learning Management System integration and a site structure that lends itself to automatic discovery of resources, so they can be catalogued in a repository.
We are now finding significant issues, though, with courseware created in HTML as it tends to be difficult to re-use in different environments, eg uploading into a Learning Management System, where linking is problematic. Hand crafted HTML for courseware, in our experience, also tends to include JavaScript, sometimes for sound pedagogical effect, sometimes not, which can create usability problems. Even simple links are often obfuscated by JavaScript, a practice that can make resources unusable, as described here by Mark Pilgrim HREF2 There are some remarks in the conclusion about how we plan to address this issue.
Other issues include the way the editorial team can become a bottleneck, with long lead times and the problem of creating print versions of materials in parallel with web versions, both of which can add significantly to the cost of production.
A common requirement is to avoid some of the costs associated with the above approach, by giving lecturers or content specialists the ability to work directly on web content. The Continuous Publishing System uses a Microsoft Word template to accomplish this. The template contains both metadata that is used to attach content to a course-master or course instance and standard styles that can be used to structure a document.
Using a Word to XML conversion application (Sefton and Arnold-Moore 2000) the system can guide the user through the process of adding metadata to a document, and then place the document correctly in the course-site structure with rendering automated via word processor styles, for a consistent look and feel to the content. This system is similar to those used at RMIT (Williams, Boulton et al. 2003) and Standards Australia (Kannegieter and Sefton 2000), both presented at AUSWEB.
There is also a convention for linking materials, resulting in a coherent, linked course web site with automated hierarchical tables of contents at the course and document level.
The Continuous Publishing System is used to import these web sites and to process them to add navigation – such as the ‘tabbed’ course table of contents seen here (this is from a University of Southern Queensland course):
This approach does have one major drawback, which is that print production is essentially limited to the document level. That is, one can create a PDF version of a document, but not of a whole course unless significant effort is expended. In this respect it is a handout approach.
Another perceived drawback, from an authoring perspective, although not necessarily from an institutional point of view is that there is limited scope to embed things such as JavaScript in the course. This is addressed in our conclusion.
A significant number of organisations wish to take a true blended approach with low-cost, high quality production processes feeding both print and web (and sometimes CD and PDA) delivery streams.
While systems such as the USQ GOOD system, with its complex document types and rigorous validation are technically appealing, they are not necessarily suitable or affordable for deployment into highly distributed environments, where training opportunities are minimal, and software costs must be kept to a minimum.
NextEd web publishing staff have developed an application that uses the XML-aware desktop publishing program Adobe FrameMaker 7. This approach uses the XHTML specification for paper and web publishing from a single source. While more typical choices of a document would be Docbook, or a proprietary DTD, XHTML has enough structure for general-purpose publishing. ‘Class’ attributes allow for domain specific material without expensive customisation. And FrameMaker’s formatting features allow several discrete documents to be treated as one book, and rendered to PDF as a unit, or as individual handouts.
This approach allows web and paper content to be authored in the same environment, with different parts included in different renditions.
The system has been completed, but has yet to be used by our customers.
There is potential to combine this with the above approach, with authors working on draft documents in Word, which are then imported in to FrameMaker in a semi-automated process. More could be done on automation, if the business case warrants it.
NextEd continues to implement business systems for distributed learning, in partnership with client organisations. The next major movement in online education is towards centre-based delivery (see the companion poster to this one).
On the purely technical level we need to seek alternatives to the kinds of scripting that some websites use, to achieve various effects, some cosmetic, and some pedagogically important. It is unlikely that the organisations producing this code are aware of the costs, in production and testing, in support, and in goodwill when things go wrong at the client-side, besides which the materials are not portable to multiple Learning Management System environments, and will likely require maintenance as the web evolves..
The process will involve working with clients to catalogue their JavaScript Repertoire and work out ways to implement solutions that achieve the desired effect while minimising costs, and maximising the re-usability and usability of the materials.
A wider issue will be introducing true distributed authoring and digital rights management capable of tracking distribution and interfacing to financial systems. Consider the situation where a course is licensed by one University (UniA) from another (UniB), then delivered by a learning center offshore, with quality oversight by UniA, and possibly UniB as well. Tutors in the center may add their own materials to the course, but must not change the basic materials. The additional material may then be replicated to other centres, automatically, or via an offer, then a negotiated licensing arrangement.
This situation will require the same family of publishing tools to be available at multiple sites, possibly with UniB supplying content in MS Word format. Uni A value adding to it by converting to XML, for book and web production, while the authoring tool of choice in a centre may be a text editor for simple annotations or Open Office for longer content. The Continuous Publishing System is engineered with this kind of complexity in mind; we look forward to reporting significant progress next year.
Kannegieter, T. and P. Sefton (2000). Content Management for all of us: The Standards Australia Experience. AusWeb2K. Cairns, Queensland, Australia. Available online [HREF3].
Oblinger , D. (1999). Putting Students at the Center: A Planning Guide to Distributed Learning, EDUCAUSE.
Sefton, P. and T. Arnold-Moore (2000). WORD TO XML: Towards a word processor interchange protocol. XML Asia Pacific 2000, Sydney, Australia. Available online [HREF4].
Taylor, J. (2001). "Fifth Generation Distance Education." E-Journal of Instructional Science and Technology 4 (1). Available online [HREF5].
Williams, R., T. Boulton, et al. (2003). When one size does not fit all - distributing content management system and web publishing in a large university. AUSWEB. Available online [HREF6].
NextEd, © 2004. The authors assign to Southern Cross University and other educational and non-profit institutions a non-exclusive licence to use this document for personal use and in courses of instruction provided that the article is used in full and this copyright statement is reproduced. The authors also grant a non-exclusive licence to Southern Cross University to publish this document in full on the World Wide Web and on CD-ROM and in printed form with the conference papers and for the document to be published on mirrors on the World Wide Web.