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The following projects, organizations and participants were the focus of this study:
Project: ESCAPE (HyperCard and HyperNews) Organizations: Educational Research and Information Systems (ERIS, Purdue) Participants: Hopper, Lawler, LeBold, Putnam, Rehwinkel, Tillotson, Ward Project: TODOR (BLOX) & Mechanics 2.01 (cT, Athena) Organizations: Athena and Academic Computing (AC, MIT) Participants: Bucciarelli, Daly, Jackson, Lavin, Schmidt Project: Physical Geology Tutor (AthenaMuse) Organizations: Center for Educational Computing Initiatives (CECI, MIT) Participants: Davis, Kinnicutt, Lerman, Schlusselberg Project: Context32 (Intermedia, StorySpace) Organizations: Institute for Research and Information Scholarship (IRIS, Brown) Participants: Kahn, Landow, Yankelovich [See the Switchboard for further information.] |
Interviews with 19 key participants and information from documents concerning
the projects served as the foundation of this study. Findings revealed that in
complex computing environments, courseware needed to continuously evolve in order
to be used over a significant period of time. Successful courseware projects
evolved organizational structures to obtain and manage a continuous supply of
informational, technical, human and financial resources. The nature of the
support structures that developed depended upon the project manager's
relationship to the more traditional academic and computing organizations.
The three different types of organizational support structures that were
identified resulted in distinctly different patterns of challenges and opportunities.
These will be reviewed in this presentation.
The implications of this study are that courseware authors and project
managers need to develop both rich "learning environments" and strong
organizational support structures upon which continued delivery depends.
The organizational structures identified during this study provide a
foundation upon which to base future investigations. It will be valuable
to further establish the operations, strengths and limitations of organizational
structures which evolve to support courseware in advanced computing environments.