5.3.1 The Creator Organizational Structure
The creator organizational structure to support the continuation of courseware
was oriented around a single faculty member who took the major responsibility
for both the administration and creation of courseware himself or herself.
This organizational structure is maintained within traditional academic structures
for courses in the university. One of the projects that clearly represented this
structure was Context32, in which Landow was clearly the lead person responsible
for the overall development. In the following description, Kahn (personal interview,
March 2, 1992) remarks about the structure of the courseware team, and the fact that
this structure is somewhat exceptional:
Kahn: The system always lended itself to working in small teams,
from say two to five people on a course. George Landow initially had three
graduate students, as well as himself, and generally ended up with a couple
of kind of lead undergraduates each semester. In some cases he managed with
one graduate student, or in some cases no graduate students, but he is
extraordinary in the sense of the amount of time and interest he has for
devoting to the system.
Note that even in this case, there were a number of other members of the
team from time to time, but the key person was the faculty member who was
the only one who retained involvement throughout. This structure is rare
in academic institutions, as are the faculty who are willing to participate in them.
The inherently limited nature of this particular organizational structure is
fairly simple to explain relative to the organizational contexts of academic
institutions and the absorbing and time consuming nature of courseware
development projects. Most faculty in universities and colleges are in
one of two situations. In the first situation, they are tenured faculty
like Landow. In the second situation they are non-tenured faculty who are
trying to obtain tenure. In the first situation, senior faculty often have
a high degree of responsibility that comes with their successful attainment
of tenure, while in the second situation, the faculty must try to take on
more responsibility to obtain tenure.
Landow himself recognized this delima and addressed the degree to which
his role in Context32 was unusual relative to traditional academic positions,
and writes about the obstacles that faculty who follow in his footsteps face.
Finally, some thoughts on the practical constraints on developing
literary hypermedia applications. For traditional literary scholarship and
critical theory, individual scholars usually initiate projects and publish
the results as a journal article or book. Such work is typically subsidized:
scholars receive released time to do research, and organs of distribution also
benefit largely from institutional subsidies. Hypermedia projects, unfortunately,
do not fit comfortably into this established pattern. Faculty developers cannot
work without fairly advanced computer equipment and often need research assistants
to do programming and data entry. Users need access to similar equipment to run
hypermedia applications. Although the equipment is becoming more generally available,
a literary scholar interested in hypermedia must operate more like a scientist,
with substantial research funding for equipment and salaries. To develop a
hypermedia unit for a course is far more demanding and time-consuming than just
preparing lecture notes; on the other hand, such a unit can then be sued at
many other institutions. Unfortunately, software development is often not
recognized as equivalent to conventional publication, with its known rewards
of tenure and promotion. Indeed, "publication" is a problem for literary software,
because there is no well-established system either of peer review or of retail
distribution. (Landow and Delany, 1991, p. 40)
Similar issues emerged across all of the academic organizations that were considered
in this research, and appear to be a pervasive condition within academic institutions
in general. Below is a similar explanation of the limitations of faculty courseware
creation which existed at MIT during the Athena experiment.
A serious concern on the part of younger, untenured faculty members is
that work on instructional software does not appear to assist them in obtaining
promotion and tenure. Departments do not have a good mechanism for evaluating
original contributions in research. (Champine, 1991, p. 73)
Champine described the key issues associated with the "faculty creator" organizational
structure of a courseware team for either tenured or non-tenured faculty.
Another developmental problem was, and still is, the standard of success
at MIT: research leadership in the discipline of the department. Time spent developing
instructional software was time not spent doing research. Thus non tenured faculty
members had little, if any, incentive to work on instructional software. Doing so took
significant amounts of time away from research that would lead to tenure. Yet, many of
the faculty members most interested in instructional software development were non tenured.
Even if tenured faculty devoted enough time to instructional software development to do it
well, they were seen as diverging from department objectives.
(Champine, 1991, p. 73)
In the case of the Context32 courseware, Landow suggests a way this model can evolve
to support continuation which emphasizes the creation of an expanding body of courseware
to serve the needs of multiple courses across departments:
Thus far Context32 has required the efforts of myself,
three graduate students, and a post doctoral fellow, and a great deal
more effort will be required to add materials to make the system match
our expectations. Obviously, it is not cost effective to create these materials
for a single course.
For a hypertext system such as Context32 to achieve anything approaching its full potential,
it cannot remain course-specific. In fact, although IRIS and the English Department
received support from the Annenberg/CPB Project specifically to create materials for
English 32, during the Autumn, 1987, I already used it for English 61, Victorian Poetry,
and (to a lesser degree) for English 137, Anglo-American Non-Fiction, a course covering
writers from Swift and Johnson to Didion and Chatwin. The next term, when I again used
Context32 to support the survey course for which it was originally designed, I also used
it for a graduate seminar in Victorian poetry, and (moving from freshman students of
English to advanced graduate students of the same field) several have used it to
prepare for the examinations that precede the doctoral dissertation.
Context32 now needs to extend beyond my courses and indeed beyond those taught by
the Department of English to History, Classics, Art History, and other disciplines,
all of whose materials could support one another.
(Landow, 1989, p. 193)
Landow also has pointed out a number of issues which may hinder this model from
becoming a wide spread approach to the development of courseware in academic settings,
unless the issues are addressed in the near future:
In order to find wider application, hypermedia needs to move into the
mainstream of scholarly work in the humanities-which will require regular funding
on a similar basis to programs already defined as core activities of universities
and colleges. This climb to a plateau of centrality and legitimacy should be
achieved over the next five years, provided that improvements are made in a number
of strategic areas. These improvements include:
1. Standardized hypertext and hypermedia formats to allow easy exchange of materials;
such standardization includes multiple active windows and sophisticated text-handling
available on powerful networked workstations.
2. Recognition of hypermedia development as a scholarly activity equivalent to
conventional publication.
3. Recognition by universities that in order to work effectively humanities scholars
now need regular and substantial funding for computer equipment and research assistance.
4. Changes to copyright laws to enable major literary textbases to be made accessible
and modifiable in electronic form. (Landow & Delany, 1991, p. 40)
The above issues show a sensitivity to a wide variety of resource limitations that
currently exist in academic settings. In a different situation, Bucciarelli
(personal interview, June 23, 1992) described an approach to sustaining the
"creator" model of organizational structure.
Bucciarelli: I found it interesting to do.
I was trying to do it in real time, I didn't have any student support.
I spent roughly 25 hours a week on this. It was an experiment about whether
it's possible to do this in real time. I think the classic notion of the
production of computer aided instructional software is that somebody develops
it over here, like a textbook, and then someone else adopts that package and
uses it in their course. Well, I think that's the wrong model for this.
That's not going to work. What ought to be available are the tools for
faculty to develop their own lecture notes, problem set solutions,
quizzes, review, interactive sections, interfaces with laboratory experiments,
overhead projections, and dynamic demonstrations for lecture. What the resources
should be are the programming tools and programming environment, and that those
are to be portable across all systems, and the level of platform you need ought
not to be more than a 386 or its equivalent. These are the tools that ought
to be available to faculty and teaching assistants, so that they can develop in real time.
And then they can develop a body of materials like lecture notes that are stored
electronically and are easily adapted to different circumstances. That's different
than producing a package and marketing it. Another point I make is that if your
model is the textbook, then you need expert programmers that can produce the
equivalent of a text, which is well tested and has all the bugs out.
If that's your model, then you need a lot of resources. On the other hand,
if you accept my model for what you should be doing, then resources don't
become a problem. What are the resources you need? It's your own time,
or it's a teaching assistant's time. If you don't take that route,
it's not going to make it, because the resources aren't there.
If the resources become the question, then it's not going to happen.
In both cases where faculty created courseware, there was an emphasis on the
need for widely available technical resources which reflected a particular
strong concern for adaptability and availability.