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Features of Development Systems

While there is some danger in trying to generalize, it would seem that the following features need to be stressed in any method for producing sizable quantities of learning material, whether it is intended for distance learning or other courses, if one is to strive for high quality highly interactive units.

• Management

  Management of the developmental activity is a very important consideration. Developing a course or a curriculum is a sizable activity, and one that must be carefully controlled. For course production to stay within budget, and on time, it is necessary that the project be carefully managed.

  Unfortunately in universities there is often little experience with management, and so course developments there often falter at this point. Perhaps one of the reasons for success of the Open University is the strong British tradition of management through civil servants. That is there is a class of people who are specially trained for the management activities.

• Types of people

  A variety of talents are important in curriculum development. No matter what process is followed there will be a need for many different skills and strategies. This suggests that we will need a development team, a group of individuals with different strengths who work together on the course. It is a mistake to think that full scale curriculum material can be produced by a single individual.

  For each of the tasks to be done we ask who are the best people for carrying out that particular task. Thus if there are design aspects of the course, in the classical sense of graphic design, we would hope that professional graphic designers would be the people assigned to these tasks.

  This need for many talents also suggests that an important issue will be the interfaces between the different tasks to be pursued. The output from a person or group doing one task becomes the input for the next stage.

• Funding

  Adequate funding is essential. If one looks at course production in such places as the Open University one finds that it costs several million dollars for a full scale effort at producing a course. Attempts to ''skimp'' at this point are not desirable, and are likely to lead to poor quality. In the United States many attempts at forming distance learning institutions have had highly inadequate curriculum funding.

• Course organization

  New technologies offer new ways of organizing courses. Development groups need not consider traditional course organizations, but can choose new structures for the material. See the paper in t;he references for some new technology based course structures. These new possibilities must receive considerable attention, as the tendency is to follow older forms of course structure.

• Full evaluation

  It is particularly important to do careful formative and summative evaluations for courses that will be used in distance learning environments. The success of distance learning institutions depends, as we have commented several times, on the quality of the curriculum material available for student use.

  • Both formative and summative evaluation are important. But they are seldom done. More common is peer evaluation, mostly of little value.

  • Formative evaluation is a critical step in the development process. No matter how skillful the developers are, it is highly desirable to test the material, perhaps several times, with actual students, in typical learning environments, and to modify the materials, each time, based on the information obtained by these formative evaluation studies.

  • Formative evaluation is particularly rewarding for technology based courses. Much of the information on student performance can be stored by the computer itself, often on a moment by moment basis as the student moves through the material. So far more useful information is obtainable under this format than in other formative evaluation strategies. This information can be used to make major improvements in the learning material before it is released for widespread use. Several cycles of formative evaluation and improvement are desirable before use.

  • Summative evaluation, while not strictly a part of the development process, is also a critical activity. We need to compare different ways of offering the course, to determine what kinds of students learn what material better with what tactics.

    It is important I would argue to separate formative evaluation and summative evaluation. This distinction, made many years ago by Michael Scriven, still is a very important feature of the curriculum development process.

    Summative evaluation must be done with sizable numbers of students. It needs to be done in the typical environments, not special environments with enormous added resources. Since students are so different, we can only do successful summative evaluations if large numbers of students, perhaps tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands, are available. Because such sizable numbers of students are needed, good summative evaluations are expensive and rare. Inadequate evaluation strategies, such as peer review, tend to dominate, and so the empirical basis for much of our existing curriculum, at all levels and at all areas, is weak.

• Continual development

  Courses should be redeveloped at regular intervals, The subject matter appropriate may change with time, and new cognitive approaches to learning may be developed. The Open University develops a new course every seven years. Courses in areas with rapid change may require 'mid-course corrections.'

The next section reviews one such development system that follows these principles.