New tools for courseware production

Abstract

PRODUCING SIGNIFICANT QUANTITIES of high-quality computer-based instructional materials is a major challenge. Using a computer as a medium for education is one of the most technically demanding man-machine interactions requiring not only calculational capabilities but also involving interactive graphics, response analysis, and complex sequencing. Moreover, pedagogical and esthetic aspects are much less well understood in this new medium than in older educational media such as books and lectures. We will attempt to provide a framework for understanding the organizational and technical issues associated with courseware production for university courses. We will focus on the production of university courses in which the computer plays a major but not the only role. We consider courses in which students typically spend several hours per week in computer-based activities but may also have lectures, discussions, textbooks, etc. Producing such substantial amounts of computer-based material is quite different from writing a few short programs to be used occasionally as adjuncts to a course, and careful attention must be paid to organizational and technical issues.

First we will contrast the advantages and disadvantages of production by teams and by individuals. We favor making it technically and organizationally feasible for individual faculty members to write their own materials if they wish. If the technical tools are good enough to make this feasible, teams can also be more productive. The second part of this paper describes and contrasts existing tools including “formatters, ” non-programming authoring systems, standard programming languages, and special-purpose educational programming languages.