Academic Computing: The 'Object' of Content Management

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Academic Computing: The 'Object' of Content Management

6/24/2005

By William H. Graves

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.