5 Organizational Contexts
It is the examination of the organizational or "human" contexts of projects
that revealed how they really grew from an initial vision to a reality in classrooms.
This requires an examination of the types of roles that were needed, the
characteristics of the people who filled those roles, and the tasks or processes
carried out by those people. Development methods were differentiated by the types
of software used to author courseware, and the organizational structures in the
organizations involved.
There were distinctly different roles required as the project moved from
conceptualization to creation. Conceptualization was generally done by one
or more faculty, while courseware development was often carried out by a
heterogeneous team. Over the course of the research, two distinct ways of
characterizing team roles emerged. The first type of distinction was based
on the types of tasks that were performed relative to the authoring tasks.
These roles corresponded closely to the types of software functions the project
chose to employ. The second way in which roles were distinguished were independent
of the types of activity performed within the context of actual development,
and was more closely associated with the relationships of the people in the
project to the academic and computing organizations in the contexts.
Throughout the projects there was also a consistent theme of the limitations
and opportunities that were afforded by the availability or scarcity of various
forms of resources. It will be interesting to examine the ways in which each
of these varied over time as the project grew from nothing to existence.