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The Interactive Campus: Administrative and Course Management System Vendors Take Up the Challenge
6/3/2002
Element K's director of product management, David Snider, explains that because the company is exclusively an ASP, its strategy is based on the assumption that all its eLearning products will be delivered over the Internet. The company's product development efforts therefore focus on improving the customer's experience on the Internet—optimizing bandwidth and designing instruction specifically for use on the Internet.The company has shaped its instructional design strategy to take advantage of new interactive media. "With our current instructional design model, called SPARK, we've combined the very best of instructional design with experience design," Snider states. One of the first courses done in the SPARK model can be seen in a product developed with Harvard Business School Publishing, called The Harvard Interactive Manager Series. Snider says, "Aside from being very rich in interactive media, we use streaming video, branching scenarios, inline projects, and assessments. An important aspect of the SPARK model is that, included with these interactive elements, there are numerous choices of learning modes that the student can make dynamically, based on learning style and what is appropriate for the exercise at hand."
VLabs ("Virtual Labs") serve as another example of how Element K incorporates different types of interactive elements into instructional design. For the study of Information Technology, it can be a challenge to get access to live equipment on which to learn to solve real problems. In addition to simulations, Element K uses real equipment which is "scrubbed" and then set up in a particular configuration for use in the problem scenario.
Snider adds that since the company is a content developer, it is also in a unique position to offer services to customers who wish to develop their own interactive content for the Internet.
Jenzabar CEO Bob Maginn relates the vision upon which the
company was founded: to enhance higher education through the introduction of an
online community and online learning technologies via the Internet, and to
integrate administrative data and functions. The company soon grew to include
both a portal gateway and a course management platform. "The Jenzabar strategy
evolved into what we call I3: Internet, Intelligence, and Integration," says
Maginn. "In order to draw people into using technology, they have to find it to
be useful in their daily lives—powerful and meaningful in advancing whatever
goals they are trying to accomplish."
Maginn cites an example pertaining
to how the I3 strategy supports interactivity. "You have to have all three
elements," says Maginn, "You have to have the Internet and accessibility, you
have to have Intelligence in the system, and you have to have Integration with
what is already built into the enterprise software and database layer on
campus." A junior wanting to find out what courses to take in order to work
toward graduation might use a handheld device to interact with schedules,
calendars, and program information, and then register for selected courses. This
is an intelligent, integrated system: in order to provide the proper information
to the student, the system has to access a database to find out which courses
the student has already taken; it must find the requirements in terms of the
courses the student must take to complete a given major, and in what sequence;
it has to know the schedule of what classes will actually be offered and
available; and it needs access to a calendar to push the information onto to
make sure there are no conflicts.
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