6.4.1 Timing, Tasks and Roles of Advanced Courseware
Most common traditional descriptions of how to approach the creation of courseware
characterize it as a formal and linear problem solving process done in stages.
Perhaps these processes do produce courseware, but they do not describe the
processes that were seen operating at successful courseware projects that were
the subject of this research. In the projects studied, there were only three
stages or states that could be identified during courseware projects. The first
state was conceptualization, which occurred before any type of software existed.
During the conceptualization of courseware, it was generally a faculty member who
found a way for computers to meet existing needs. Successful projects appeared
to stem from long term visions, so that to obtain resources only served to provide
an opportunity for the realization of projects which had been conceptualized long before.
When resources became available, courseware projects entered an active second stage
in which they were developed through an event driven cycle. Courseware creation
activities were done by teams. The most obvious and traditional way to characterize
the teams was with function oriented types of descriptions based on the tasks they
performed with different types of software. In the contexts of the organizations
in this study, courseware developers did not feel the need for formal procedures,
nor did they tend to use them. In contrast, during the creation of courseware,
the majority of processes were very general and informal. When formal products
like assignments, manuals, or written documentation were created, they evolved
from the requirements implicit in events, rather than by a general need for them
during design.
Continuation was a third state of courseware projects. Projects in this state
were very similar to projects during creation. They were characterized by event
driven efforts to continue the delivery and maintenance of successful courseware
through the continual provision of resources of various types. The conditions
surrounding the continuation of courseware were dependent upon the types of
provisions for continuity that existed across changes in the team that supported
the courseware, and the technical computing environment in which it operated.
Part of the tasks of courseware creation was to create the conditions through
which courseware could continuously be implemented on a regular basis.
The major task became to provide the organizational conditions that would
be required to maintain the continuation of needed resources.