Wednesday, 14 July 2004: 3:15 PM-4:00 PM

Oceanic 5 (Walt Disney World Dolphin Hotel)

I-3: A New Object Based Learning Delivery Model for Consortiums

The digital proliferation and delivery of content is growing at an exponential rate placing extreme pressures on existing learning platform processes and mechanisms. In particular, the tasks of identifying, capturing, copyrighting and reusing learning objects has now become of critical importance to expanding learning communities of interest and on institutions as commercial pressures increase.

A challenge then exists in the ability to provide a shared, physical infrastructure framework for rapid, centralised deployment but allow for the virtual partitioning of application layers into ‘communities of practice’ so that consortium participants can manage the content and its context directly. This may further extend into users becoming “individually managed participants” in a community of practice.

Using WebCT Vista and HarvestRoad Hive® a new, standards-based four stage process is evolving to deal with these issues. This process includes stages of:

• instructional design and content creation, • management of reusable learning objects through independent, ‘federated’ digital repositories • content assembly using a tool that easily creates IMS and SCORM compliant packages (containing a “manifest” of package content references) • content delivery through a SCORM compliant Learning Management System.

The results from this new service delivery model include:

• rapid course creation and replication via IMS/SCORM manifests that link to content by reference, • true global collaboration and sharing of single instances of a learning object through a digital repository, • cost reductions through infrastructure sharing, • network enhancement features and reduction in content duplication practices, and • the beginning of true and effective copyright management of an institution’s intellectual capital.

In conclusion, this heralds the emergence of “second generation packaging” of management systems to capture, track and deliver intellectual capital either institutionally or in global or local alliances.