AusWeb2k-The Sixth Australian World Wide Web Conference, Rihga Colonial Club Resort, Cairns, 12-17 June 2000

 Confirmed Keynote: Paul McKey

Keynote Presenter: Paul McKey <paul.mckey@nexted.com>

Keynote Title: Preparing Campus Information Systems for Global Web-based Education

Web-based Education has three major influencing elements; pedagogy, technology and commerce. Much expertise exists in the first two in universities but little of the latter. Taking the student's perspective of a Web-based education system shows that these elements are still not working in sync with each other, which is critical for the commercial Web-based enterprise to be successful. The development of empowering technologies such as XML and RDF and the IMS Project will allow us to develop systems that make use of the strengths of the above influencing elements. This though will require a re-engineering of typical organisational information and workflow systems to move away from the current, expensive 'cottage-industry' of content development and course management.

The major advantages to an organisation of this re-engineering are to:

• Provide greater reuse of existing material across subjects;

• Provide ease of tracking of all material in the system;

• Provide a choice of structures for lecturers and faculty to develop material to;

• Provide greater responsibility and ownership of information to reside with originator of the information;

• Provide greater control of presentation of material;

• Provide greater economies of scale via automation;

• Provided consistency of quality across all offerings;

• Prepare material for commercial sale in a global education market.

The required flexibility of the educational material coincides with the desired flexibility of teaching and learning styles and so it is necessary to evolve the information systems to support different structures, learning methods and business models.

Presenters Bio:
Paul McKey is currently the Chief Technology Officer with NextEd Ltd <http://www.nexted.com> a Hong Kong and Australian based company which partners with universities throughout the world to provide global online education systems. He was previously the Australasian Training Manager for Apple Computer Australia and left Apple in 1993 to pursue developments in online education and training. His company Redbean Pty Ltd develops Big Tree On Line <http://www.bigtree.com.au> - one of the first commercial, Web-based training sites in Australia.