The term "open courseware" is used to describe modular courseware that is inherently flexible, and has the capability of being used as part of an integrated learning environment. In an "open courseware" scenario, academics can select appropriate teaching materials from a diverse range of courseware products (e.g., via compact disks, the University network, or the internet (especially World Wide Web)) in order to create a custom learning environment. In other words, lecturers can regularly, eagerly and effortlessly "pick and mix" from distributed courseware products, to create integrated learning environments that are tuned for particular courses and groups of students.
"You are preparing a tutorial package in subject area X. You discover someone's CAL package which contains four components:
- an explicit statement of learning objectives
- an interactive presentation
- a simulation
- a self-assessment component.
You examine all four 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."
(Scenario 1 from section 2.2 of EPOC Report No. 1 "Report of the TLTP Working Group on Open Courseware".)
In this report there are several scenarios described. Some, like the one above, are trivially simple, and some deliberately include the kind of elaborate cluttered detail which real-world scenarios provide. 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 might be to them.
The collection of scenarios is intended to be an evolving collection; hence the current collection has been included as a modular appendix to this report rather than as a bulky section of the main body of the report. Readers are encouraged to consult Appendix A as required to read more about scenarios.
One of the recurring features of these scenarios is that the lecturers are able to browse and build courses out of previously authored materials in addition to developing their own work. Of course it would be very convenient if there was a single CAL package which met all the requirements of a course, 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 package which is perfectly matched to the objectives of a particular tutorial.
The 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 alongside their own. 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.
Although the scenarios illustrate what users might do, they avoid clearly describing how the various tasks are performed and they avoid prescribing the detail of what the necessary software tools are really like. A substantial range of software tools is implied within these scenarios. Not only does the user require tools to browse available resources but they must also have tools to assist with the incorporation of these materials into their own customised learning environments. Consider some of the facilities required when configuring such environments:
Some of these facilities require integration with the chosen authoring system in some way. However, as the scenarios illustrate, it is unlikely that the various CAL resources would be authored using the same authoring tools. Hence, facilities for linking need to be able to cope with linking between "compatible" resources and also between "incompatible" resources. This underlines one of the main goals of open courseware - to allow otherwise incompatible resources to become compatible. Facilities to enable all of the above activities, and many more, can be collectively labeled as Courseware Management facilities. Courseware Management is the main focus of the next section.