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Uneven Progress-We Need to Catch Up
7/8/2004
Coincidentally, my Syllabus colleague, Howard Strauss, of Princeton University, recently captured this concern of Zemsky and Massy in a prescient way in his recent Syllabus article titled What's Next: Course Creation Systems. Zemsky and Massy put it as "there needs to emerge a dominant design, particularly for the learning objects that are eLearning's building blocks. It is not just a matter of making them easier to create-although that end is important-but also more interchangeable and more easily linked with one another. Howard calls this a Course Creation System (CCS), and it fills the bill.
Why did we ever think that faculty, except for a few bleeding-edge folk who contribute mightily to the MERLOT collection, would ever be able to find the time and get enough support to create libraries full of learning objects? It's much easier to learn the ins and outs of a CMS and how to produce a slide show. When you're young and a student, and if you have time on your hands, you might just spend the time to learn new things. And young people learn things more quickly. Zensky and Massy found that students' software purchases reflected items that do have somewhat steep learning curves-such as Adobe Photoshop, Acrobat, and various Macromedia products. Students are putting those things to use to express themselves, in some ways to create reports and papers that are more like learning objects than the slide shows their professors put on the class Web sites.
If you're a faculty person, the learning curve to get facile in those programs, not to mention even more sophisticated programs relating to three-dimensional stuff and video, is imposing. PowerPoint fills the bill without much of a learning curve. And course management software lets you think you're doing the latest thing-a subtle subversion of transformation.
What if the CCS made it as easy to create useful learning objects as to produce
a slide show? Would we then see a transformation in teaching and elearning practice?
As Howard puts it: "Learning management systems are now pretty good at
managing courses. It's time we had software that [easily] creates something
for them to manage." It can be done.
About the author: Terry Calhoun is Director of Communications and Publications for the Society
for College and University Planning (SCUP). You can contact him through CT's IT Trends forum by clicking here. View more articles by Terry Calhoun.
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