Richard Nantel

Last month, The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University announced its annual Berkman Awards for outstanding contributions to the Internet’s impact on society. One of the winners this year was Rice University’s Richard Baraniuk.

Professor Baraniuk won the award for launching Connexions, a public learning content management system (LCMS) that allows teachers to share digital resources and learning content, modify them as required, and provide them online under a Creative Commons license. This free, open-source platform is a building block toward a system of open educational resources.

The content in Connexions is presented in two formats:

• Modules, which are like small “knowledge chunks,” or learning objects
• Collections, groups of modules structured into books or course notes or for other uses

The site reports that it presently contains “5,690 reusable modules woven into 339 collections” and covers a very wide range of topics of interest to anyone. Readers of this blog may benefit from the following courses on the topic of learning and technology:

• Best Practices in Online Teaching – Pulling It All Together – Teaching Blended Learning Courses (m15048)
• Best Practices in Online Teaching – During Teaching – Promote Active Learning (m14977)
• Learning Design and Open Source Teaching (m14733)
• Building a Learning Community: Democratic Values (m12921)

Many more courses on online learning are available here.

Mr. Baraniuk spoke at TEDS back in 2006 about how digital learning content such as that found in Connexions will replace academic textbooks. His talk was titled “Goodbye, textbooks; hello, open-source learning.” A video of this presentation is available here.

There was a time when almost all computer-based training (CBT) was developed using one of only a handful of software applications. Authorware was one of the most popular authoring tools available. Over the last 20 years, thousands and thousands of hours of CBT and online courseware have been developed using the tool.

Although Authorware 7 continues to be for sale on Adobe’s Web site, the company has announced that it will no longer continue developing the software. Version 7 is to be the last.

For course authors who have been using the tool for years, this must come as a blow. They’ll need to learn to use other tools. Since Authorware’s flow chart interface is uncommon, this will require authors to learn a new way to work.

I had dinner with an old friend last week who works for a Fortune 50 firm. His organization needs to maintain and update legacy libraries of Authorware courseware. This company will eventually either need to convert the content or re-author the courses using Flash or some other tool. Whichever they choose, it will take time and money.

Years ago, I developed a number of database-driven Web sites using a Macromedia product called Drumbeat. The product was swiftly retired and replaced with Dreamweaver. Weeks later, a new version of Windows was launched, and my old Drumbeat application no longer worked on the new OS. How was I to update the applications I had built?

I worked hard at trying to salvage months of work. In the end, I just bit the bullet and recreated all the Web apps in Dreamweaver. Since the choice of an authoring tool had been mine, not my customers’, I did all this work for free.

Here’s an idea for how companies such as Adobe could make new friends: turn Authorware into an open source project. Make the code freely available, and developers will likely start doing innovative things with the software. This may well breathe new life into the product.