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Academic Computing: The 'Object' of Content Management
6/24/2005
But to drill more deeply into the application of these ideas, I asked Russ Adkins and Jeff Larson, instructional technologists at Broward Community College (FL), for enlightenment, based on their proof-of-concept experience there.Proof of Concept
Broward created one of the nation’s first online nursing AS Degree programs in 2000-2001. As part of a continuous- improvement effort for this program, the college recently parsed, captured, and stored the digital content from the program’s 12 nursing courses. The result was a Nursing Program Content Repository in which digital content has been stored, retrieved, and assembled into learning objects to reduce the time and cost of improving courses, and to permit the creation of specialized program variations.
Instructional design process. Working with an instructional designer, a group of nursing faculty created schemas (content organizers) based on surgical-medical topics. The content was “chunked” into granular assets based on faculty recommendations. For example, a complete PowerPoint lecture on gastrointestinal diseases was broken down into smaller units of no more than two slides. The content was then converted to HTML in Dreamweaver MX (www.macromedia.com) using templates and style sheets for consistency of look and feel. Images essential to the content were embedded within the content HTML and also unbundled from the content as separate assets. The digital content repository contains more than 3,000 assets—HTML files without images, HTML files with images, and images as stand-alone assets.
Using a course management system as a content repository: one example. Chunked content initially was stored in a CMS. Designer/developers created a course shell, used topic modules as schema organizers, and uploaded the content into appropriate schemas. The content had no metadata assigned to it, but could be searched via keywords. Still, downloading the content to build a course proved challenging. Users had to obtain the original HTML files by locating them in the designated schemas, and then downloaded them using the CMS’s file management function. Another glitch: If the content asset contained an image, it had to be downloaded separately.
As it stood, the CMS supported the export of content in an IMS package, but limited the process to massed content within each schema (or topic module). Users couldn’t selectively pick individual pieces of content for reuse. Overall, the CMS provided acceptable short-term storage for content, but using it to store and retrieve content for course building was not a viable, scalable, long-term solution.
Using a dedicated content repository. The Florida Distance Learning Consortium (www.distancelearn.org) licensed HarvestRoad Hive, a “CMSagnostic” digital content repository and was looking for a proof-of-concept project. Broward partnered with the FDLC to house the Nursing Program Content Repository.
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