In this appendix there are several scenarios described. Some are trivially simple, and some deliberately include the kind of elaborate cluttered detail which real-world scenarios provide. Mostly, the preliminary scenarios avoid being too specialised. However, specialised, realistic scenarios are easy to imagine in any subject area, so while reading our imaginary scenarios we invite readers to imagine equivalent "pick and mix" scenarios for their own subject areas.
Scenarios are important for at least the following reasons :-
The scenarios described within this report are just preliminary attempts at providing material which contributes in each of the ways mentioned above. Hopefully, the scenarios described herein will immediately serve to enable the reader to speculate on what their use of open courseware might be like and what the benefits of open courseware can be to them. The collection of scenarios is intended to be an evolving collection; we invite contributions from anywhere.
Imagine you are preparing a tutorial package in subject area X. You discover someone's CAL package which contains four components:-
You examine all four of the components and, although you like them all, you decide that the only component which is really 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 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.
This is a scenario which may well be carried out on a "day before the tutorial" basis. A lecturer is teaching a course on Object Oriented Design, and is putting together a computer based tutorial for one of the topics in that course (e.g., the Dynamic Model from the Object Modelling Technique (OMT)).
Her department is well equipped with large amounts of computer based courseware stored on a central fileserver and accessible via a network at any of the student workstations on the university campus.
Among the available on-line courseware resources are Computer Aided Learning (CAL) modules covering a huge range of topics, including some specifically written for teaching aspects of:-
There are also many modules available for subjects as diverse as Fluid dynamics, Cosmology, Food Hygiene, Business French, and so on.
The lecturer has seen some of this courseware (but not all) so she has some idea of the kind of material which is available. Her intention is to browse through the on-line courseware and select a few items which she thinks will be suitable for her particular group of students, studying this particular topic (the Dynamic model from OMT) at the particular level of this unit (e.g., introductory). Of course, it would be very convenient if there was a single CAL module which met her requirements, but, just as it is rare to find a book which precisely meets a lecturer's requirements, so it is rare to find a CAL module which is perfectly matched to the objectives of a particular tutorial. Instead the lecturer will most likely have to use pieces of courseware taken from a number of different CAL modules.
The lecturer pieces together her tutorial using a software tool which we will call a "browse and build" tool. This tool interacts transparently with a number of other software entities to search for CAL modules, present lists of them to the lecturer, execute them on demand, and create a tutorial consisting of selected modules, or parts of modules. The resulting tutorial takes the form of a file to which the lecturer can direct her students, and which will result in the selected CAL material being presented to the students.
The lecturer logs in at her workstation, opens a window labelled "Courseware" and double clicks on the "browse and build" icon to launch the browse and build tool. This tool offers a number of avenues for browsing the existing collection of on-line courseware resources; e.g., it offers:-
Using the various search and import facilities of the browse and build tool, the lecturer finds a number of modules relevant to her tutorial. (We use the term "modules" here to refer to pieces of courseware of any size, from a single activity covering a single concept and lasting just a few minutes, to an entire course intended to be covered in the duration of a semester.) She reviews several Topics (i.e., she works through the courseware) in some cases deciding to use an entire Topic as it stands, and in other cases deciding to use some of the Activities from a Topic but ignoring others. After about an hour she has collected the following set of courseware resources.
From the Course "Object Oriented Design" she has an entire Topic "Dynamic behaviour" consisting of several Activities. From the same Course, she also has two Activities ("Object diagrams" and "Interaction diagrams") from the Topic "Notations for dynamic behaviour". Finally from the Course "Real Time Systems" she has the Topic "State transition diagrams", again consisting of several Activities.
To complete her tutorial she now needs to provide a convenient way for her students to access these modules. The browse and build tool has facilities for building simple maps, so she creates a blank map and adds four buttons, which she labels "Dynamic behaviour", "Object diagrams", "Interaction diagrams" and "State transition diagrams". She then selects the "Dynamic behaviour" button and chooses "Link to..." from the menu, which brings up a floating palette with buttons "Link" and "Cancel". She then launches the lessons map for the Topic "Dynamic behaviour" and presses the Link button on the palette. She is returned to the browse and build tool. Pressing the "Dynamic behaviour" button will now launch the lessons map for the Topic "Dynamic behaviour". She links the other buttons to their respective Topics and Activities in the same way, and then adds a background graphic to her map to make it more attractive. It is the background she always uses, and which her students now recognise as hers. Finally she chooses "Make tutorial file" from the menu of the browse and build tool. This creates an executable file which students can run, and which will present her new map.
The whole process has taken an hour or two, most of which was spent reviewing the CAL material itself before deciding whether or not to include it in the tutorial.
This is a small contrived scenario which has been designed to illustrate some important aspects of manipulating open courseware without becoming too complex to describe. The subject area was chosen to be quickly familiar to anyone (everyone watches television). The scenario is deceptively simple, but actually if the detail is stripped away one is left with examples of fundamental tasks which open courseware must be able to address, for example, the differences between linking and embedding local or remote resources is contrived to exist within this example. Hence the smallest number of minimal examples of essential open courseware features were specified first, then all the decorative environment of cartoons, etc., were added afterwards. The "skeleton" of this scenario described abstractly is intended to be useful for design discussions. Also, although this simple scenario is looked at from the courseware provider's point of view, bear in mind that at each stage the materials form part of a working student environment.
Let us imagine that a US cartoon factory produces "Tim & Gary", a weekly silent cartoon feature in which an otherwise friendly cat (named Tim) attempts to kill the resident mouse (named Gary) using methods which are guaranteed to be suitable for family viewing. These cartoons are available via a subscription service in a format suitable for integrating into the department's CAL packages (or showing to your kids!).
A rival company parodies the characters of Tim and Gary in its own cartoon series "Bitchy & Hatchet" in which an otherwise friendly cat (named Bitchy) attempts to kill the resident mouse (named Hatchet) using methods which are not suitable for family viewing. This series is similarly available to the department. Fortunately, the European distributor of "Bitchy & Hatchet" releases two English versions of the cartoon, the additional one being edited for family viewing.
A lecturer in our department prepares CAL materials for an open access course on TV studies. While preparing a module on cartoon violence he includes a review of the two series incorporating links, via networks, to example episodes of each: "Tim Goes to the Vet" and "Bitchy Sells Hatchet for Medical Research". As this is an open access course he clearly specifies that a link to the edited version of the latter is required.
A French lecturer, also preparing CAL materials, discovers our package on cartoon violence and obtains permission to translate the review into French and incorporate it into her own module on censorship. While doing the translation she takes the trouble to remove the family viewing restriction placed on the cartoon as her course is only used as part of an adult education programme; she does this by modifying the links appropriately.
Back in our department a new course is prepared for students doing a one year post-graduate course in film studies. A small introductory unit is written with a link to the previous work. As part of a project, one of the students writes a hypertext essay on censorship and incorporates links to our CAL package and also to a translation of part of our French colleague's work which she has allowed us to use on a quid pro quo basis.