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Using a term that make sense only in abstruse technical discussions, and that is opaque and confusing to practitioners does not make its potential benefits clear to teachers. Instead, it presents the potential of pitting those responsible for instruction unproductively against those advocating technological change. It is not that the innovation should not come from outside of education, or that it can only come from within. It is simply that innovations must be presented in terms that are meaningful for teaching practice.

This research shows that the rate of adoption increases significantly when innovations possess some of the following characteristics: 1) simplicity, 2) compatibility with existing methods and techniques, and 3) relative advantage in comparison with these established methods and techniques (Rogers, 1962).

There is much to be done to make these resources widely useful. Much better systems of categorization and searching, and more robust mechanisms for updating and submissions are required. Learning resources need to be tied more closely to learning objectives, but in such a way as not to be tied to a specific curriculum.

It is nearly impossible to identify consistency in format, scope, methodology, educational level or presentations. Some resources include lesson plans, but many others do not. Some are authored in Java, others in HTML, and others in a hybrid mixture known only to the author. Some involve ten minutes of student time, others would occupy an entire day. And there is no structured means for an instructor to know which is which.

To cite a typical example, Bates (2000) estimates that a course consumes 30 days of a subject expert’s time, plus an additional seven days for an Internet specialist, plus additional expenses for copyright review, academic approval, and administration. A budget for course development, adapted from Bates’ Distance Education and Technology (DET) unit (p. 138), is presented in Table 1. Table 1. Sample Course Development Budget Bates’ estimate is conservative. He assumes an experienced course author and HTML specialist. He does not include any instructional design costs. Course design is straightforward and does not involve the development of any interactive media or course-specific Java programming. All of these would add significantly to the CDN $24,000 total cost.

Almost all online course developers use the design model Bates describes. It involves a course being developed from scratch, using nothing more than a traditional university course or a good textbook as a guide. The course author typically authors all the content, including examples and demonstrations, quizzes, and tests. Because of the cost of development, there is little use of course specific software or multimedia. The course is then offered to a small number of students over a limited time, resulting in course fees that are comparable, if not greater than, traditional university course fees.

We can do so much better than this. We need to design online courses – even university courses – in such a way as to reduce these costs without diminishing the value of a university education. We need to do this by extracting what these courses have in common and by making these common elements available online.

From a certain perspective, an online course is nothing more than just another application, and software engineers have long since learned that it is inefficient to design applications from scratch. Educators need to apply design techniques learned long ago by the software industry, and in particular, they need to learn a concept called Rapid Application Design (RAD).

The application of RAD for software development allows a designer to select and apply a set of pre-defined sub-routines from a menu or selection within a programming environment. A good example of this sort of environment is Microsoft’s Visual Basic ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbasic/ ) a programming environment that lets an engineer design a page or flow of logic by dragging program elements from a toolbox.

Online course developers, pressed for time and unable to sustain $24,000 development costs, will begin to employ similar methodologies. An online course, viewed as a piece of software, may be seen as a collection of reusable subroutines and applications. An online course, viewed as a collection of learning objectives, may be seen as a collection of reusable learning materials.

The idea behind object-oriented design is that prototypical entities, once defined, are then cloned and used by a piece of software as needed. Suppose, for example, as a programmer you needed to store information about 'students.' You would first design a prototypical student and define for it properties common to all students.

While most guides and references currently discuss online course authoring, the proper reference point is the authoring of learning objects, where a learning object is an element of a course as described above. As we have seen, a learning object may be one of any number of items: a map, a webpage, an interactive application, an online video – any element that might be contained inside a course. There are two major facets to authoring learning objects. The first is the content of the learning object itself; the second is the metadata describing the learning object. We might think of authoring learning objects as akin to authoring pieces of a puzzle, in which case the content is the image or picture on the surface of the piece, while the metadata is the shape of the piece itself, which allows it to fit snugly with the other pieces.

While there will be, no doubt, much debate regarding the instructional design of learning objects, in practice designers have opted for a performance-based or competency-based theory of design.

he process follows three steps: Identify the job task Identify the skills and knowledge necessary to complete the task Develop training in modular chunks that are organized to support the task Learning, with this model, is outcome-based rather than content-based. It focuses on what people want (or need) to do, rather than on what there is to know.

Most educational institutions would find a definition of learning objects based on specific tasks to be somewhat limiting. However much work has been done regarding the definition of learning outcomes in general, and a wider definition of learning objects would be tied to these outcomes. Specifically, the content of a learning object would be derived from a discussion of a course’s (or a lesson’s) learning objectives, where the achievement of these outcomes can be measured in terms of students’ performance. In sum, the overall content of a learning object would be similar in scope and nature to the content of a typical lesson. Many lesson-planning aids exist;

A learning object authoring environment would employ a very similar interface, while clicking on the component area would enable an editing screen for that component. Thus, for example, if the author clicked on 'Learning Objectives,' she would be greeted with a list of learning objects appropriate for that course, from which she would select one or more. Or if she clicked on 'Tools and Resources' a list of suitable online resources would be displayed.

For any object, text-based or multimedia, an associated set of metadata needs to be created. The type of object determines the content of the metadata.

More complex metadata editors will include mechanisms for parsing and displaying existing metadata documents. They will also include forms for a wide variety of resources; the list of fields in these forms are defined by schemas, as discussed above. Sophisticated metadata editors will not define the fields for different types of forms internally. Rather, they will access schemas from various sources around the Internet. A list of available schemas for online learning is provided on the IMS website http://www.imsproject.org/metadata/mdbest01.html.

Each of these objects is created and stored in a database. The contents of this database are available to course authors. Some databases may be available over the Internet, while other databases will be available only internally. In order to create a more complex entity, like a lesson, a number of these entities are collected together in what is called a package

How would this work? At this point, much of what follows is speculation, since the required systems have yet to be constructed. Using an authoring tool, an author will select (from a drop-down list) a packaged-sized entity, for example, 'Lesson.' The authoring tool will retrieve the schema for 'Lessons' either from a local database or – better – from a central schema resource online. The schema defines the fields that must be filled out (filling some automatically, especially if the lesson is part of a large project). Additionally, since the object in question is a package, the program knows that it will be composed of other objects: an interactive display, for example, a movie, or some other resource. These options are presented to the author: the author selects 'insert' and then selects the type of object to be inserted.

At this point, in traditional course authoring, the author would start to write content for the new component. And this will still be an option – if the author selects 'new' the appropriate authoring tool will be opened and the author can create a new resource, as described above.

If the author is authoring a lesson, the course authoring system already has some significant information. It knows, for example, what the topic of the course is, what the grade level is, what the geographic region is, and more. These would all have been defined when the course was created, and these values are inherited by any object that forms a part of the course.

If, then, the author wishes to add a resource, the authoring system has the information it needs to conduct a highly selective search of resources. The system may search a local database, but more likely, it will search an online learning objects repository. Such a repository won’t actually contain these resources – they will be distributed on websites around the world – but it will contain information about those resources. Specifically, it will contain those objects’ metadata.

The author can instruct the authoring tool to accept only resources approved by a certain standards body or meeting a certain learning objective, or falling within a certain price range. The author at this point may preview the material, or she may decide to insert it into the course. At this point, the metadata – not the object itself – is inserted into the course package. The author moves on to the next item in the lesson, and in a very short time – hours, not days – completes the lesson, and eventually, the course.

Yet what about traditional university education, where professors see their courses as unique creations which re-make the field of enquiry each time they are taught?6

This approach is the core of traditional liberal arts education. It is this very aspect of online learning which pits computer-assisted learning, such as is envisioned in a learning object economy, against traditional face-to-face professorial learning. Let me grant that this sort of reexamination of the material is necessary and desirable. But let me question whether this process at the same time serves as an effective teaching methodology.

To put the question in as sharp a light as possible: do first-year engineering students need a brand-new Shakespeare course, or will the interpretation developed last year (or two years ago, or in Saskatchewan) do the job? And moreover: is it fair to require that students, whose primary goal is at best a surface understanding of “Hamlet” to pay for the development of a brand-new interpretation, when last year’s, or Saskatchewan’s, would have done just fine? I agree that hand-rolled bread, carefully prepared by a master chef, is superior in quality to a standard loaf purchased at a supermarket. But to a person who is merely hungry – rather than a connoisseur – the obligation to purchase only hand-rolled bread is more than just an imposition, it amounts to a denial of basic sustenance for many. The question is: could we teach first-year English using 'Hamlet' modules? Could we reduce the cost of such learning by an order of magnitude? Are the endless creations of professors necessary for the eventual goal of cultural literacy? Is it reasonable to deny such an education to many (especially in less developed nations) in order to generate each course anew each year in each university classroom?

There is very much a tension, between those who create the knowledge, and who jealously guard their monopoly over its propagation and distribution, and those who must consume that knowledge to get a job, to build a life, to partake fully in society. My personal belief is that arts and humanities professors – even those who teach senior courses – will have to redefine their approach or be priced out of existence. Probably history, not argument, will show whether this belief is well founded.