REPORT OF THE TLTP WORKING GROUP ON OPEN COURSEWARE
EPOC's home page on the world wide web is at
http://www.amtp.cam.ac.uk/icrd/EPOC/index.html
The advice and guidelines contained in these reports are summaries of the views held by the EPOC members and should not be regarded as prescriptive. They are provided for information purposes only and should be used as pointers towards good practice in the development of computer based materials for higher education. While every care has been taken in preparing these guidelines the authors and publishers do not accept responsibility for any omissions or inaccuracies which may have occurred.
This report was produced by EPOC - the TLTP Working Group on Open Courseware.
The courseware development community in UK higher education has now produced significant volumes of computer based courseware across a diverse range of subject disciplines. The major escalation of courseware development during the last few years is largely attributable to the Teaching and Learning Technology Programme (TLTP). The widely held aspiration is that the freely available courseware emerging from the TLTP will become widely implemented within higher education institutions and that new and innovative ways of delivering higher education will be enabled by these courseware resources.
However, there are serious bottlenecks, both cultural and technical, which could impair the widespread exploitation of existing and future courseware. An awareness of these issues led to the formation of the EPOC (Enabling the Provision of Open Courseware) Working Group in November 1994. The shared beliefs and concerns of the group can be briefly summarised as follows:-
The beliefs are that for courseware to be widely exploited within universities:
The concerns are:
The EPOC Working Group (hereafter referred to as EPOC) believes that ultimately courseware will need to be 'open courseware' before the diversities can be successfully accommodated, the necessary integration can be achieved, and the technical incompatibilities eliminated. EPOC believes that 'standards for open courseware' are an essential requirement for the courseware community. EPOC also believes that these standards need to emerge out of, and hence be compatible with, the existing courseware developments, rather than be specified remotely and imposed upon the courseware community. To this end, EPOC is trying to promote a collaborative approach to providing solutions which can be placed in the public domain.
The road to achieving 'open courseware' is, however, fraught with difficulties. An immediate, overnight migration for all existing courseware is quite simply not possible. Hence, EPOC has been concerned with establishing short-term partial solutions, which can ease some of the immediate difficulties, and with longer-term solutions which can make strides towards genuinely open courseware.
A discussion of all the relevant issues is too large an undertaking for one report. Hence, this report is intended to provide just an overview of the main issues and a framework for subsequent reports which can focus in more depth on various specialised aspects.
Included in this report are:
It is EPOC's intention that subsequent reports will be published in due course. All EPOC reports will be located on the World Wide Web and are intended to be evolutionary documents. In particular, EPOC intends to continuously update references to related work; hence, relevant links to the work of other courseware practitioners are always welcome.
The first two of the envisaged subsequent reports will be:
EPOC Report No.2 - Pre-requisites for Open Courseware
EPOC Report No.3 - Towards a Framework for Open Courseware
The 'Pre-requisites for Open Courseware' report will provide advice and guidelines on some very fundamental technical issues, e.g. what is required to successfully install and operate different courseware products on the same machine, e.g. what should developers do now to anticipate migration towards open courseware, etc.
The 'Towards a Framework for Open Courseware' report will provide a discussion of what EPOC sees as relevant issues in achieving the longer term goals of genuinely open courseware. It will also provide brief summaries of several courseware management systems and illustrate how they are contributing towards the goals of open courseware.
We use the term 'open courseware' to describe modular courseware that is inherently flexible and has the capability of being used as part of an integrated courseware environment. In an 'open courseware' scenario, academics can select appropriate teaching materials from a diverse range of courseware products (e.g. via the main University network, or from compact disks) in order to create a custom learning environment suitable for specific courses and groups of students.
For the purposes of illustrating some of the ideas behind open courseware we will look at the process of developing and using courseware resources from several different points of view. Our small imaginary scenarios assume the existence of an open courseware culture within higher education and take us from development through to use. The scenarios have been designed to illustrate some important aspects of open courseware without becoming too complex to describe. We have avoided using realistic subject specific scenarios for these illustrations; however, realistic scenarios are easy to imagine in any subject area, so while reading our imaginary scenarios we invite readers to imagine equivalent scenarios for their own subject areas. Further discussion of scenarios, especially their usefulness for establishing design requirements is included in EPOC Report 3 'Towards a Framework for Open Courseware'.
You are preparing a tutorial package in subject area X. You discover someone's CAL package which contains four components:
You examine all of the components and, although you like them all, you decide that the only component which is useful to your tutorial is the simulation. Given that 'open courseware' is now ubiquitous, it is trivially easy to adopt just the simulation component and smoothly integrate it into your own diverse collection of CAL components. The days when 'closed courseware' forced you to adopt 'all or nothing' are thankfully a thing of the past.
A courseware developer writes his material using a visual programming tool, say, ToolBook. Rather than attempt to integrate the movie file and spreadsheet which accompany his material he chooses to defer this task to the courseware management system and registers his work as three separate courseware resources. This makes it easier for him (or his successor) to update the spreadsheet with more realistic prices each year and to use better quality video footage when it becomes available without having to modify his ToolBook books. His material is distributed on a CD-ROM as part of a collection of materials by various authors in his subject area but he provides annual updates to the data and video via an anonymous FTP site on the Internet.
A lecturer approaches the technician with a CD-ROM picked up from a recent conference and asks if the material could be made available to her students. The lab technician is quickly able to assess which items of courseware can be used on the equipment available and the lecturer selects the ones she wishes to make use of in the lab. As one of the videos she wants to use is too demanding for all but the best machines, she uses her own multimedia PC to edit a copy of the clip, reducing the picture size without compromising the soundtrack quality. The lab technician uses the modified clip instead of the one supplied on the CD-ROM when installing the materials on the lab network.
In the lab, the students start up the shell program provided when they log on to the system. The shell is a locally written program designed to provide easy access to the software available in the lab. In addition to the courseware resources provided by the lecturers there are also tools designed to aid their use. These familiar tools work across all the courseware and allow each resource to be used as part of an integrated learning environment with maps, appropriate reference materials and so on.
These scenarios are still futuristic, and they imply several things. Firstly, they imply that substantial CAL resources are available. Secondly, they imply that academics want to contribute to growing bodies of such resources and that they are willing to exploit other people's resources as part of the process of creating their own resources. Thirdly, they imply that very substantial technical progress has been made in terms of developing inter-operable courseware, i.e. producing courseware which is sufficiently 'open' and which enables 'pick and mix' to be trivially easy to perform.
We firmly believe that it is not only desirable that lecturers be able to work in this way, but that if computer assisted learning (CAL) software is ever going to be widely adopted within the higher education community it is actually essential that lecturers can 'pick and mix' courseware in ways that are analogous to the way they currently 'pick and mix' with paper based teaching and learning materials.
Clearly, the actual processes of 'picking and mixing' courseware components, and the creation of hybrid learning environments, need to be easy for lecturers to perform. However, the technical innovations required to simplify the task of performing these processes are definitely not trivial. It is therefore not surprising to find that these facilities are not yet available - anywhere. There are however many indicators of progress towards providing these facilities and there are several examples where a 'pick and mix' facility is readily available but only within the confines of some proprietary system.
Some of these steps towards open courseware are discussed in the next section 'TLTP and Open Courseware - Findings to Date'.
Further discussion of scenarios, especially their usefulness for establishing design requirements will be included in EPOC Report 3 'Towards a Framework for Open Courseware'.
The establishment of an open courseware culture in UK higher education is likely to have an impact on many areas within the sector, including:
Areas of the private sector, in particular publishers and software houses, are also likely to be affected by widespread adoption of open courseware. However, in this report we are primarily concerned with the effects on higher education and the following discussion focuses solely on this sector.
Students would benefit considerably from access to courseware constructed to meet the exact needs of their course. At present, students have to put up with software which approximately meets the needs of their course but in places is a superset or subset, sometimes an empty subset, of their actual educational needs. The quality of open courseware is likely to be higher as a result of lecturers being able to pick and choose individual elements of competing packages from different suppliers; in the same way that good lecturers pick best coverage of individual subject areas from different text books.
Even the largest and most successful courseware packages produced by TLTP cover only a single subject discipline. For most support skills, subjects which would normally be service taught by other departments, students must learn to use a different TLTP product. Learning to use each of these packages places an extra cognitive burden on the student. Inevitably, a number of aspects of the user interface are bound to vary from package to package to suit the nature of the subject matter and style of the author. However, a great many core functions (e.g. navigation between lessons, glossary access, references access, student notes, printing, logging on/off, etc.) could be standardised in open courseware so that the student only has to learn these functions once.
Few existing courseware packages are linked into a courseware management system. Under open courseware, all courseware would be capable of linking with such a system. This would provide the student with early warnings, from the system or their lecturer, that they are falling behind. At present, all too often, the first confirmation students get that they do not adequately understand a subject is when they fail a test or examination by which time it is too late.
The ground breaking nature of TLTP courseware has raised a number of important issues for network administrators and technicians charged with installing and maintaining the software in the student labs.
At the simplest level, it is not always straight forward to establish the hardware and system requirements of a given courseware package. Open courseware would standardise the format of this information and where it is stored, displayed and documented in a deliverable. This would make it simple for technicians to answer the question: 'Can we run X on our current hardware?'.
Also at a fairly simple level, but something which is by no means a trivial problem, it is not always possible to run different courseware packages under the same system configuration due to conflicting or mutually exclusive requirements. Open courseware would make courseware developers more aware of these co-existence issues and will, at the very least, make it easier to predict conflicts before purchasing software and wasting time trying to make it co-exist.
At a more complex level, it may become possible for technicians to configure open courseware through the courseware management system to adjust features such as animation frame rate, colour, caching, write access, etc. to suit the local hardware capability and operational policy. However, this aspect carries a cost in terms of technician training.
The benefits listed above for students and technicians are also benefits for lecturers, making it simpler to meet the specific educational needs of the student and profiting from the more efficient running of networks and labs.
Probably the most appreciated benefit for lecturers is that open courseware will enable far more comprehensive courseware management systems to be developed to reduce the administrative burden of tracking student progress. Less time spent marking and more feedback on how students are progressing through their work will free up lecturer time to concentrate on those students who need individual assistance or encouragement. Contact time with students can be more effectively spent.
In addition, the ability to construct obscure and esoteric courseware by combining components from a variety of different courseware packages makes it possible to realise the benefits of Computer Assisted Learning (CAL) in areas where it was previously uneconomic to create suitable courseware. The increased course coverage by courseware also levers the benefit of courseware management systems.
At present, if a lecturer requires courseware he must either purchase an existing package or develop, or have developed, a bespoke piece of courseware. Open courseware provides a middle ground which, for most lecturers, will be a far more profitable use of their precious time; with open courseware a lecturer can 'pick and mix' existing components without delving into the complex and costly realm of software development.
Obviously, the skills required to 'pick and mix' courseware have to be acquired by the lecturer and there is a cost involved. However, it seems reasonable to argue that this, effectively, capital cost may be recouped by the recurring benefit of more efficient running of courses derived largely from the courseware management aspects of open courseware.
Open courseware relieves the developer from the need to develop common core functions (e.g. navigation between lessons, glossary access, references access, student notes, printing, logging on/off, etc.). Developers still have the option to develop their own version of these functions and, if they do, courseware from other developers will also work with their tools/functions. This in itself creates a whole new market for these common functions.
The cost and effort required to develop open courseware is lower than at present where each development needlessly duplicates aspects of previous ones. Niche courseware markets would become viable due to the reduced cost of developing courseware and due to demand from lecturers willing to 'pick and mix' chunks of courseware to construct their customised courses.
Open courseware places a number of, we believe, acceptable constraints on the courseware developer in adhering to standards covering certain areas of their work. In addition, there is a cost attached to becoming familiar with the standards and to demonstrating compliance for a product.
The courseware management functions possible in an open courseware culture have the capability to make students, technicians, courseware developers and lecturers more effective in their respective roles. The resultant improvements in teaching quality enhances the reputation of the institution and attracts increased grant funding.
Adaptability in courseware provision assists adaptability in course provision which in turn increases the institution's ability to respond to changes in student demand in the current competitive and fast moving environment.
Student usage tracking also provides information which can guide the provision of computing facilities and help predict future changes in demand.
Standards in courseware management also promise considerable potential for the enhancement of existing university administrative computing functions to give both operational efficiency gains and, potentially, competitive advantage to the institution.
In a culture of open courseware, increased use and coverage of courseware and improved management facilitated by courseware management systems seem likely to improve both the quality and efficiency of teaching.
There is a risk that an attempt to foster an open courseware culture will fail either because it is technically unattainable or because no widely accepted standard can be agreed upon by the courseware development community. The cost of such a failure is not in itself substantial due to the low level of investment required from any involved party. However, the cost of not moving towards open courseware could be considerable. Without open courseware, the development of sophisticated courseware management systems is unlikely to occur due to the lack of a single, sufficiently large market. Also, without open courseware, much unnecessary redundancy will remain in the development and implementation of courseware throughout UK higher education.
In the previous section we briefly described typical scenarios which will hopefully emerge when open courseware becomes widely available. In this section, we describe the technical inadequacies of the current situation, draw attention to the emergence of 'courseware management' as a main issue, and assert that 'standards for open courseware' are an essential requirement for the courseware community.
We also provide a few pointers to what is currently available and what is currently emerging.
The issues presented in this section will be further elaborated in EPOC Report 3: 'Towards a Framework for Open Courseware'.
To appreciate the relevance of open courseware it is important to differentiate between large-scale courseware and small-scale lessonware. Many people are engaged in the process of developing lessonware, i.e. small units of Computer Assisted Learning (CAL) material developed using a diverse range of authoring tools, programming languages, software applications, etc. As yet, there are far fewer people engaged in manipulating hundreds of lessonware products to form large-scale courseware resources.
The use of terms 'courseware' and 'lessonware' is not meant to imply that there is a clear line dividing the two; it just draws attention to the fact that on the one hand we have the physical development of small chunks of CAL material - lessonware, and on the other hand we have the manipulation of hundreds of chunks of CAL material - courseware. To differentiate further, we refer to 'lessonware development' as being the process of authoring and constructing a small piece of CAL material, and we refer to 'courseware management' as being all the techniques used to implement, adapt, and use large-scale courseware resources. These two aspects of implementing CAL material require different tools and techniques.
Re-configuring courseware resources is an essential part of using large-scale courseware. One aspect of this is the desire of authors and lecturers to create, reconstruct or adapt small pieces of lessonware. Our discussion is not primarily concerned with this level of adaptability which would typically require working with the original authoring tools and source material as appropriate. Our discussion is more concerned with publishers, learning resource managers, authors, and lecturers wishing to endlessly re-configure growing collections of lessonware resources into new courses or revised catalogues, etc., without necessarily producing any new lessonware. Constructing virtual courseware structures by picking and mixing from existing lessonware resources (and offering user-friendly ways of viewing and navigating those structures), is exactly the kind of courseware management task in which publishers, resource managers, authors and lecturers will regularly engage. Last but not least, students also require courseware management tools and techniques in order to use, and possibly adapt, courseware resources.
In the introduction of this report, we expressed a concern that effective courseware management is seriously impaired by the lack of open courseware. We asserted that currently emerging courseware products are technically diverse and not guaranteed to be compatible, i.e. not open. We are obviously not criticising diversity in an educational sense. We believe that educational diversity is an asset but that arbitrary technical diversity is a hindrance in many ways, and in particular it seriously disables effective courseware management. In the world of courseware, arbitrary technical diversity currently appears in such areas as courseware structuring techniques, navigation and orientation facilities, viewing facilities, approaches to resource integration, various aspects of user interfaces, etc. This kind of arbitrary diversity is reminiscent of (and the courseware equivalent of) a pre-Macintosh, pre-Windows era in personal computing when average users were bewildered by a variety of micro-computers, operating systems, application interfaces, etc. The solutions will follow the same analogy, i.e. standards like Windows have removed layers of arbitrary diversity and provided users with enormous benefits coupled with acceptable constraints. Equivalent standards in areas of courseware management will inevitably emerge and will similarly offer the courseware community enormous benefits coupled with acceptable constraints.
If standards for courseware management are going to emerge it is reasonable to ask 'from where are these standards going to emerge?' and 'what is currently going on in terms of courseware management?' There are many projects in which some aspects of courseware management have been addressed; these findings are not intended to be seen as an exhaustive list of such projects.
Firstly, it is worth restating that there is a difference between courseware and lessonware so that we can clarify the relevance of authoring tools to courseware management. Authoring tools, e.g. Authorware, HyperCard, ToolBook, and many others, are all very useful devices for producing lessonware. They all offer better or worse facilities for making attractive screen designs, facilities for structuring and accessing information, flexible control over multimedia resources and some even offer powerful programming facilities. However, none of them offer any built-in facilities for generic courseware management. Those authoring systems which include reasonable programming facilities have enabled developers to build some of their own courseware management facilities or at least enabled developers to develop courseware which can interact with other courseware management facilities. The main points are that authoring systems and courseware management systems are not the same tools and that current authoring systems provide almost none of the required courseware management facilities.
Approaches to courseware management appear in many shapes and guises. So, for example, it is interesting to see how CD-ROM producers tackle the structuring of material on their CDs. Popular computer magazines now assemble digital magazines on CD; publishers produce electronic books and multimedia encyclopaedias on CD; TLTP projects produce courseware packages on CD; and all of them are trying to work out how best to distribute and operate material over the Internet. Courseware management techniques can be informed by all of the above even though none of them have yet matured to what we would call 'open courseware'.
Many TLTP projects have discovered that courseware management issues need to be addressed, and many have developed their own courseware management solutions. A typical scenario for a TLTP project has been to develop courseware as the primary goal, and en-route to develop some 'hard-wired' solutions to the management of the specific courseware simply as a strategy for making the courseware usable. Sometimes, after the event, a project has then tried to generalise the courseware management facilities and develop them into more general-purpose courseware management facilities. In other cases, there have been specific attempts made to firstly define general-purpose courseware management facilities and then to make them available for courseware development projects. The overall result from the point of view of the courseware community is that there are now many courseware management approaches to encounter. The 'in-house' courseware management facilities developed by each TLTP project offer various degrees of flexibility to the users of the courseware, and some even offer elaborate pick and mix facilities. However, the facilities are usually limited to the boundaries of the particular system and cannot usefully interact with equivalent facilities in another system. So, if you are a publisher, a learning resources manager, a lecturer or a student, with each TLTP product that you encounter, you will find a different set of courseware management facilities and find yourself requiring a different set of techniques for manipulating the courseware. In some cases, the problems are much worse than the inconvenience of learning new techniques and operating new facilities. In some cases, the different courseware management systems are fundamentally incompatible. The incompatibilities can prevent the simultaneous operation of two systems, and in more severe cases can make it difficult to successfully install both systems on the same machine.
There is currently a rapidly growing interest in exploiting the Internet for courseware distribution, and inevitably this is having an impact on approaches to courseware management. However, it should not be assumed that facilities like World Wide Web (WWW) are in any way a panacea for courseware management problems. It is probably wiser to view WWW as something which all realistic approaches to courseware management will definitely need to accommodate and exploit, but WWW by itself does not yet offer simple solutions to operating large structured resources in client server mode. So, for example, you can currently realistically operate a 500Mb multimedia encyclopaedia on a CD, but to have the same encyclopaedia operate on WWW requires either that you download the entire 500Mb (and take a vacation while it downloads), or it requires someone to totally re-construct the encyclopaedia for use on WWW. When downloading 500Mb only takes an instant, we will of course be worrying about how to operate large structured resources with hundreds of gigabytes instead, so speed increases will not by themselves solve the current inadequacies of the World Wide Web.
In a subsequent report EPOC Report 3: Towards a Framework for Open Courseware, we provide further details about several systems which provide a variety of solutions or partial solutions to different areas of courseware management. The list is not a summary of all the interesting projects which exist; it just includes those systems which members of the EPOC Working Group have either discovered, or been involved with, and which serve to illustrate key courseware management issues. An overview of these systems provides a reasonable overview of what courseware management involves. Systems reviewed include: Caleidoscope, HyperCourseware, Hyper-G, Mathwise CMS, Mentor, Microcosm, SuperCal and WinEcon.
The current situation in the courseware community is one where many partial solutions have been developed to courseware management issues. The ingenuity behind these solutions is sometimes very impressive but always it is flawed by being isolated. The courseware community does not need a proliferation of increasingly ingenious isolated solutions, it needs solutions which are compatible with other solutions - it needs standards.
In this section we try to provide suggestions for useful ways forward. We are trying to find a way of bridging the gap between a desirable tomorrow when ubiquitous open courseware allows everyone to comfortably re-configure large courseware resources to suit their own requirements, and today's difficulties where incompatible courseware resources can even stubbornly resist sharing the same machine.
Inevitably, no immediate overnight fixes are available to magically transform the courseware community's legacy of useful, valuable, but sometimes incompatible courseware into co-operating courseware objects. Hence, we need both a short-term and a longer-term strategy to achieve the goals. In this section we discuss recommendations for short-term measures and then describe the kind of project required to enable open courseware to become a reality as quickly as possible.
For the short-term, firstly EPOC hopes that this series of reports will raise awareness of the issues and that this awareness will also contribute in unforeseen ways. Secondly, a recommendation is aimed primarily at courseware developers. Courseware developers can continue to design and build 'closed courseware' and hence continue to add to the problems, or they can think ahead to the kind of scenarios which we have described in this report. Courseware developers can become more aware of the requirement to develop open courseware and take appropriate design steps. A problem, of course, is that it is not obviously cost effective for overworked courseware developers to improve their designs for future benefits. Most courseware development activities are bounded in scope; they simply aim to work within their own boundaries - why should a courseware developer in subject X bother about whether the courseware will be compatible with courseware produced for subject Y? If standards for open courseware were available then courseware developers would have every incentive to adopt them, but as yet, there are no standards. In the absence of standards, the best that can currently be achieved is some guidelines which if adopted may ease the eventual migration of courseware from its current closed state to a more open state. This will be the purpose of 'EPOC Report 2: Pre-requisites for Open Courseware'. Report 2 will provide advice and guidelines on some very fundamental technical issues, e.g., what is required just to successfully install and operate different courseware products on the same machine; what should developers do now to anticipate migration towards open courseware, etc. This is not a comprehensive list of short-term solutions; it is intended to be an opening document placed on World Wide Web and used to promote a dialogue about short-term recommendations. EPOC's report is simply intended to start the ball rolling, how far it rolls will depend upon everyone else too.
To address the concerns outlined in the introduction to this report and enable the benefits described in section 2.3: Benefits and Costs.
The EPOC project has the following objectives:
EPOC believes that by achieving the above objectives, many of the 'non-integration' and 'technical incompatibility' bottlenecks can be tackled and a culture of open courseware established. An important aspect of EPOC's approach is that it will enable existing products to migrate towards open versions. There is too large an investment in existing material to simply write it off and start again; it is essential that a technology is established which enables relatively painless modifications to be made to existing courseware.
The beneficiaries can be categorised following the life-cycle of courseware products, for example:
There is now a thriving community of people in the second category above, i.e. developers of courseware. These people come from very diverse backgrounds, sometimes with some computing experience, but advanced software development skills are no longer a requirement for many courseware developers. For these people, descents into low level software development issues are a distraction from their primary roles, e.g. instructional design. This community will benefit immensely from guidelines and standards which 'enable' them to produce open courseware. The phrase 'enable' is highlighted to emphasise that the areas within which standards are being advocated are all concerned with courseware inter-operability and are totally neutral with respect to educational issues. There is no fear that these standards would constrain innovation or be prescriptive in areas such as instructional design (for example).
Educational publishers are experiencing major upheavals in their businesses with the advent of electronic publishing. Both the medium and the content are undergoing revolutionary changes. Educational publishers are more interested now in courseware products than they have ever been, and they are naturally keen to avoid the problems associated with incompatible technologies. Unfortunately, at this point in time, courseware products are seriously incompatible with each other in ways which make manipulating diverse products much more complex than it should be. FRAMEWOC offers to remove many pointless incompatibilities which currently bedevil courseware products.
Academics, lecturers, and teachers are notorious for suffering from the 'not invented here' syndrome. Irrespective of whether this is justifiable, it is a fact that if courseware resources cannot be easily adapted to the educationalist's local requirements then they will be consigned to gather dust. Only when open courseware of the sort advocated via FRAMEWOC is available will professional educationalists genuinely enthuse over exploiting courseware.
Ultimately, the choices should be in the hands of the students. As educational options become more modularised, so too should the process of exploring courseware become totally flexible. A student should be free to browse through courseware resources and feel that the process of browsing is consistent no matter how diverse the subject matter is. This will only be possible when standards for open courseware are adopted.
The Framework for Open Courseware (FRAMEWOC) will define an architecture for Co-operating Courseware Objects (CCOs). It will also define the communications protocols for CCOs and include a software infrastructure which enables the CCOs to operate upon various support layers. In particular, the software infrastructure will determine (i) how the CCOs can exploit the emerging industry standards for 'Component Integration Models' such as OLE, OpenDoc, and CORBA, and (ii) how CCOs can be implemented on the Internet using World Wide Web. This adoption of object-oriented and client-server approaches, and an exploitation of emerging industry standards, are mandatory aspects of the development strategy.
In this project the EPOC Working Group aims to provide the theoretical specifications for FRAMEWOC and to deliver demonstrator software products on PC and Macintosh platforms. The software products will include the CCOs infrastructure and case study examples of Co-operating Courseware Objects including both Courseware Resources and Courseware Management Systems. The demonstrator Courseware Resources will be adapted versions of existing CAL products taken from a variety of subject disciplines and will be representative of current products developed using a wide range of authoring tools.
The main deliverables: a Framework for Open Courseware - FRAMEWOC
EPOC believes that standards for open courseware need to emerge out of, and hence be compatible with, existing courseware developments, rather than be specified remotely and imposed upon the courseware community. A Framework for Open Courseware (FRAMEWOC) is intended to be a public domain standard for Open Courseware. The process of producing a specification for FRAMEWOC is being managed by the TLTP Working Group EPOC, but an important aspect of defining FRAMEWOC is the collaboration between the EPOC Working Group and the developers and users of existing Courseware Management Systems (CMS) and Authoring Systems. The collaborative process is central to the development of FRAMEWOC, and will help to ensure that the FRAMEWOC specification is able to satisfy the range of diverse requirements for Open Courseware. Details of how that collaboration is organised are available from EPOC's home page on World Wide Web (see page 1).
EPOC also recognises the importance of wider collaboration in a venture of this kind. So, for example, given that FRAMEWOC is intended to be integrated with World Wide Web facilities, an important aspect of the project is dialogue with projects which are primarily WWW projects but which have bearings on how courseware will be operated on WWW. An example of this kind of collaboration is a link with a UKERNA project based at Brighton University, i.e., the W3Lessonware project. Similarly, there are library-based projects which are addressing issues of managing learning resources via networks. For example, a project under JISC's Electronic Libraries Programme has the self-explanatory title of 'Sharing of Educational Resources in an Electronic Network'. Projects of this kind are addressing issues which are related to courseware management issues. However, the lack of standards in courseware development effectively precludes libraries from easily incorporating current courseware into their sharable resources. It would be in everyone's interests if the courseware community was developing open courseware to standards which removed these obstacles.
EPOC also recognises the importance of an international dimension to any project which involves standards. At this point in time, our counterparts in other countries are no further advanced down this road, so there is no-one to follow. There will, however, inevitably be teams in other countries who are embarking upon similar quests and EPOC is very keen to establish dialogue with such teams.
Courseware is a term used to describe software resources which are used for Computer-Assisted Learning (CAL).
Courseware Management refers to all the activities which are required to assemble, administrate and endlessly adapt structured collections of CAL resources, to create navigable views of those structures, and ultimately to ensure that the resulting courseware is 'open'.
Courseware Management System a suite of software tools designed to enable courseware management.
Open Courseware refers to modular courseware that is inherently flexible, and has the capability of being used as part of an integrated courseware environment (as yet there is no 'globally' open courseware).