Approaching Academic Digital Content Management
Content management systems can be used not only to publish and maintain
course content electronically, but perhaps more significantly, to help
coordinate the use of learning objects across disciplines or levels and to
tailor content to meet individual student needs.
An increasing amount of digital content—from individual
simulations on cellular biology to complete online courses—is being produced by
higher education institutions. There is an unprecedented opportunity to reuse or
share this content between course sections, in other courses, and even among
institutions. Yet, regardless of the model used to generate the digital
content—whether created by faculty, by instructional design teams, or through
departmental templates—most institutional structures and even course management
systems have typically facilitated content sharing only within individual course
boundaries.
Institutions generally have not had the ability to globally
store, share, and search for content from courses. As a result, content is often
used by only one course or even just one section of a course. As institutions
seek to recognize a return on their e-learning investments, as well as to
increase the quality and consistency of their course offerings, the ability to
identify, share, and reuse exceptional learning content becomes a high priority.
A related need is for digital rights management so that contributors to content
repositories feel that their efforts are being appropriately credited or
compensated.
Academic Content Management
Institutions are seeking ways
to make content more modular so that material that is applicable to a specific
skill or task—not necessarily to a specific discipline—can be leveraged across
many courses and departments. These smaller learning modules are referred to as
learning objects. Learning objects are "chunks" of content that contain learning
materials, which may include lectures, interactive activities, or assessments.
The learning objects can be assembled to achieve a specific educational goal.
Metadata, organized as descriptive fields surrounding the learning object, may
describe what the object contains and how it might best be used. In addition to
information about the author and form of the content, institutions can label
their learning objects to include information about how long the material will
take to complete, prerequisite knowledge or skills, and even applicability to a
specific learning style.
Cost concerns, time commitment, and desire to
improve student learning encourage colleges and universities to think long and
hard about new ways to use and reuse learning content. Content management
systems can offer ways to create digital content, tag it for appropriate uses,
store it, control access to it, search for it, and reuse it effectively.
Institutions can potentially assign roles and permissions to content,
facilitating the efficient use of learning components across the educational
enterprise. To encourage reusability, a content management system should
facilitate metadata search capabilities, the ability to selectively release
content based on multiple criteria, and flexible options for content authoring
and delivery.
Putting the System in Place
Ohio State University has
embarked on a project that uses an enterprise-wide content management strategy.
The project calls for a learning object repository and the development of
learning objects and curricula to assist students in developing competencies in
scientific and information literacy. The curricula will be created in eight
broad disciplinary contexts and will consist of what the science-oriented Ohio
State developers have dubbed "learning molecules"—objects that include primary
materials, student activities, and assessments.
After the repository of
learning objects is developed among the OSU faculty, the templates, search
engine construction, and content will be made available through the Ohio Board
of Regents to other Ohio institutions to extend sharing of content across the
state. This will be a standards-based environment with templates available for
the creation and sharing of learning molecules. The system proposes to leverage
WebCT Vista, a new e-learning platform that features enterprise-level content
management.
Creating Learning Molecules
Faculty at Ohio State,
working in concert with reference librarians and instructional designers, will
identify the learning materials, student activities, and assessment processes
needed to teach a specific skill or lesson. Information technologists will then
incorporate these items to create digital learning molecules, giving faculty the
ability to reuse these learning objects when creating their online
courses.
Ohio State's digital library system will be incorporated to simplify
the creation and documentation of course content for faculty, as well as provide
a search engine for the discovery and reuse of existing materials, activities,
and assessments. In addition, teaching resources and strategies will be extended
across disciplines, allowing for a more robust exchange of content and ideas.
For example, a statistical reasoning learning molecule may be used by a pharmacy
class to evaluate drug interactions; the same learning molecule may also be used
by a food science course to assess allergens in hybrid crops. Long term, one of
the major benefits of the system will be access to the information accrued about
the relationships among and coordination of learning objects.
The learning
molecules will be framed for use within three dimensions: (1) by discipline, (2)
by curricular level, and (3) according to learning style preferences. Faculty
will have the ability to select molecules that are customized to the preferred
learning style of their students. For instance, a visual learner in nursing
might prefer an interactive animated simulation of a patient's body mass to drug
metabolism, while a verbal learner in organic chemistry might prefer a text
narrative in bi'energetics. Neither the content nor the learning styles are
"pure," but reflect preferences for information processing and predominance of
how the content is displayed, e.g., an animation may well contain a descriptive
paragraph, but the dominant sense modality for transferring information is
visual.
Creation of Learner Profiles
A key part of the project is
the development of detailed learner profiles, which collect information about
each student with respect to current knowledge attainment, learning style, and
disciplinary interests.
Faculty at Ohio State will have the ability to match
specific learning objects to learner profiles and course goals. For example, if
a faculty member determined that every Biology I student should successfully
attain an application knowledge of ethics, he or she could identify learning
molecules that match these specific learning criteria. Learner profiles are
updated as students successfully complete each learning molecule. As a result,
faculty can create highly customized learning paths for students and
automatically track their achievement. This strategy allows an instructor within
a given class to assist individual students by addressing gaps in their
knowledge, as well as permit classes to build on prerequisites for
students.
Meeting the Mission
The goal of Ohio State's project is to
establish a model for the storing, discovery, sharing, and reuse of learning
objects. Each year, higher education institutions produce vast amounts of
digital content, and they have significantly increased the number of online
courses they offer. A single online course can contain an unlimited number of
content pages—which means that the potential amount of digital content that
could be produced in an academic year is staggering. There has been no simple
way to manage, store, and share digital course content. By using an
enterprise-level content management strategy, hopefully this project will
demonstrate one that has wide-ranging applications.
Stephen R. Acker is an associate professor in the School of Journalism
and Communication and director of Technology Enhanced Learning and Research
(TELR) at Ohio State University. [email protected]