If you restrict your focus to any one of the systems discussed in appendix B. then various "pick and mix" facilities will be achievable. However, it is the problem of picking and mixing across various systems that remains to be solved satisfactorily. It is not realistic to say "if everyone just uses system X then we won't have a problem". Of course, the current favourite version of this claim is "If we all just use the World Wide Web then we won't have a problem". The claim that the web solves all the "standards" problems has become one of the most common misconceptions during the last year or so. An analogy can help to provide a more sobering perspective. Imagine that you were part of a group trying to cultivate "transport standards" at the level of "what should traffic lights do?", "are there standard ways that cars should behave at traffic islands?", "what are useful standards for traffic signs?", etc, and then some newcomers to the discussion tell you that all the old standards questions are about to become irrelevant because some new standards are about to emerge. When asked what these new standards are the newcomers reply "we're all going to use roads". The equivalent incredulous remarks in a courseware management sense would be to say that standard protocols for co-operative courseware objects don't matter any more because we're all going to use HTML.
Courseware management issues are a layer of concerns which sit on top of the underlying technology (WWW / HTML, Java, authoring tools, software applications, etc.) and courseware management embraces all of these technologies. None of these technologies in any sense replaces the need to deal with courseware management issues. Hence, it is fair to say that any courseware management approach which fails to embrace WWW technology is probably destined to become fossilised but it is hopelessly naive to assume that WWW by itself solves any of the courseware management issues. At this point in time (summer 1996) it is fair to say that WWW offers fabulous opportunities and very many complications to the world of courseware management. In many respects the facilities currently offered by early generations of web servers and browsers are actually very crude. The facilities for creating modular structured collections of linked courseware resources, and for providing multiple navigable views of those resources, etc., is very crude indeed, and much cruder than the equivalent facilities found within current CMSs running on stand-alone platforms. This situation will of course change very rapidly.
One trend is for web servers to become much more sophisticated. Two good examples, one from the academic world and one from the commercial world, are :-
A second trend is for existing courseware management systems to become web-aware. This trend mirrors the efforts made by the vendors of existing authoring tools to make their products web-aware, e.g., Macromedia's Shockwave plug-in for Director, and Asymetrix's Neuron plug-in for ToolBook. A year ago, one could hear people predicting the inevitable demise of products like Lotus Notes; some people naively predicted that world wide web would make Notes obsolete. Now it is obvious that the issues which Notes has spent many years mastering (e.g., the civilised management of distributed diverse resources) are issues which web products are only just starting to tackle. Hence, as Notes continues to become more web-centric, it has moved from being a predicted fatality to being a leading web product. The same story is true for authoring systems, i.e., Java will not suddenly make Authorware or ToolBook obsolete and it certainly doesn't offer immediate fixes for the large legacies of non-web courseware which have been written using authoring tools. Adapting the existing products seems to be a more viable option in most cases. The same story might be true for courseware management systems which adapt their existing mature functionality to web environments.
In some related work, part of the EPOC group has been exploring the issues of re-engineering legacy courseware products (i.e., courseware not designed originally for web use) to become viable over the world wide web. There are many efforts being made in this area by many people, and some of these have been investigated in some detail. Reports of these investigations will eventually be referenced from within EPOC's web site. Titles to look for are :-