Academic Computing: The 'Object' of Content Management
- By William H. Graves
- 06/24/05
Broward Community College set out to create a digital content
repository, and encounters true 'proof on concept' along the way.
IN THE ARTICLE, Content Reuse in Practice (Step Two Designs
Pty Ltd. 2004; www.steptwo.com),
knowledge management consultant James Robertson notes that few institutions
practice content management and re-use—even as their investments in academic
digital resources grow and beg for economies of scale and coherent management
and reuse strategies. Clearly, improved content management has everything to
do with improved institutional performance.
One of two strategies for such improvement—the common course redesign strategy—assigns a faculty team to redesign a high-enrollment course to improve learning
effectiveness and cost-efficiency, knowing that all future post-pilot sections
of the course will rely on the redesign team’s pedagogy and course resources.
The redesigned course is common not only to a large number of enrolled students,
but also because it adheres to a common, evidence-based quality standard assured
by continuous assessment and improvement.
Understandably, course and program redesigns raise the issue of how to manage
digital instructional resources. These resources are being used and improved
over time, at scale, by multiple instructors—even multiple institutions. The
issue is layered, and views digital content/digital assets
(HTML pages and other disparate digital files representing notes, slide-show
presentations, video, images, audio, etc.) as the building blocks of learning
objects. Learning objects consist of lesson-oriented “chunks”
of self-study materials, learning assessments, and frameworks for learning interactions
involving students and instructors. Many academic technologists enthusiastically
refer to content repositories of reusable learning objects
to capture the open community vision of developing, storing, sharing, and improving
digital content, and the learning objects that can be assembled from it.
A digital content repository, like a library, has a hierarchical structure
determined by its “librarian,” and can be easily searched, provided that each
of its learning objects and digital assets is tagged with metadata adhering
to common standards such as IMS (instructional management system), SCORM (sharable
content object reference model), and others. Some CMS (course management system)
vendors, such as Desire2Learn (www.desire2learn.com)
and eCollege (www.ecollege.com),
provide tools for creating a digital content repository within the CMS. Other
companies, such as HarvestRoad (www.harvestroad.com),
focus solely on tools to create and support a digital content repository.
A systematic effort to parse all courses in a degree program (or a cluster
of key courses) into well-designed learning objects (based on more granular
digital resources) can result in cost-and time-efficient options for 1) delivering
and updating the program and its courses, 2) ensuring consistency in instruction
when adjuncts or new instructors are part of the instructional staff, and 3)
recombining learning objects to create differentiated versions of the program.