Another aspect of SCORM that may be addressed at this stage is that of content decomposition. It does not have to be the level of granularity of an ‘object’ as defined by SCORM. Various estimates have been offered describing how much information is actually retained by the learner given the medium of delivery. The consensus is that there is too much information currently available concerning most topics. It cannot be argued that the information presented to students needs to be organized in such a manner to allow slow digestion by serving them in small pieces. This ‘just-enough’ teaching style assures that students are not overwhelmed and thereby are able to retain more of what is actually presented because they are not sifting through irrelevant or superfluous material. (Nichani, 2001) All too often, the information that is presented is too much for one person to truly absorb and retain. A Content Management System may be able to assist in organizing decomposed content.
MIT’s OpenCourseWare endeavors to meet the sharing challenge to an extent. MIT OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW), a large-scale, Web-based publication of MIT faculty’s course materials, enables the open sharing of the faculty’s materials and pedagogy. This initiative connects visitors with the syllabi, lecture notes, and calendars of 700 courses (Potts, 2003). In addition, most course sites include a subset of other materials such as multimedia simulations, problem sets and solutions, past exams, reading lists, sample MIT student projects, and a selection of video lectures. Educators are encouraged to utilize the materials for curriculum development, and self-learners and students may draw upon the materials for self-study or supplementary use. While promising, MIT OCW also has its drawbacks. It organizes the information in static web pages through which students or viewers must navigate to locate a specific segment. The student cannot do a simple ‘keyword search’ to locate specific content. The student is offered the ability to select from a master list of courses and then permitted to go through the materials manually to find the specific area of interest.
H. CONCLUSION
SCORM’s basic idea is to create once and use often. With this guiding principle in mind, the focus at this stage of SCORM implementation at NPS should be to first foster a sense of sharing. Rather than invest millions into new technologies, NPS should better employ technologies it already owns. As described in prior chapters, course conversion is one of the major challenges in implementing SCORM. Instead of spending countless hours designing new material that may or may not be SCORM-conformant, or having the courses go through a conversion process, why not use that which has already been created and is ready for sharing?
An LMS is appropriate for those students/users that are enrolled in the class. However, individuals who are interested in accessing the information but are not registered cannot have easy access to it, nor are they aware of its existence. These individuals do not need the full spectrum of services within an LMS, such as grades, progress evaluation, participation records, or tracked learning. They merely want the benefit of access to the content.
Most professors do not want to be content designers; they want to be teachers. They are educators, not instructional designers/technicians. Their expertise, and thus their true value, lies in their ability to breathe life into concepts and theories. A CMS would not require learning new technologies, unlike any LCMS. The professor may need to spend a great deal of time to learn the new technology just to be able to use an LCMS. It may not add much value to implement the new technologies into particular courses. A CMS would allow sharing of information created by the technologies already known to the professors. Even if the conversion process were simplified through templates and storyboards, the new converted material would still be shackled and caged within the LCMS that created it. To extract the material, the institution would need to make the LCMS available to everyone that needed access to the content.
This thesis proposes a dynamic Content Management System for the Naval Postgraduate School and will be discussed further in the next chapter. It addresses the first user requirement of SCORM: make content sharable. A CMS offers the needed level of granularity to organize information for easy identification and extraction. It does not force or demand such a fine granularity as to remove context from the learning content. A dynamic CMS would allow a ‘keyword search’ of content in addition to manual navigation. Blackboard is currently developing such a feature. The proposed CMS would have the ability to update itself dynamically as new content is placed within it. It also maintains the integrity of the many relationships in order to maintain the context of the material.
VI. CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM DATABASE
A. INTRODUCTIONA Content Management System (CMS) is a single database designed to manage all content within an organization. The prototype CMS discussed in this chapter was designed and constructed using a relational database.