Authoring Productivity Environments
Instructional Systems Design Performance Support Systems Interactive Multimedia and
Distance EducationIsland MultiMedia and its Associates have extensive expertise and experience in the
design and development of powerful multimedia authoring productivity tools.
Constructed to work with the authoring system of your choice, these
sophisticated tools:
Increase
Productivity
Increase
Instructional Effectiveness
Increase
Learning Efficiency
Increase
Product Consistency
Improve
Project Control
Reduce
Testing and Quality Control Costs
Simplify
Staff Training
Capture
Expert Knowledge
Interactive training, job aids and performance support materials developed
using these tools can be migrated to new authoring system environments or
repurposed for new clients at a very low cost. The tools enable you to capture
the best expert knowledge in instructional design, control logic and media
application in powerful and complete lesson instructional strategy templates,
at the project level.
The evolution of computer based training (CBT) authoring tools has progressed
steadily since the 1960’s. While the increases in functionality have been
impressive, increases in productivity have been less significant, and increases
in instructional rigor have, with one or two exceptions, been non-existent. It
continues to be the case that authoring systems deal with “ways to do things”
rather than with “what things to do”. (Fairweather and O'Neal, 1984)
Recently this trend has been broken by the emergence of powerful and productive
lesson template and automatic lesson generation environments in a variety of
military, industrial, and technical training projects in the U.S. These
production environments differ considerably from traditional CBT production
approaches. (O'Neal and Jennings, 1989; Baer and O'Neal, 1988.)
That is, instead of micro-transaction templates such as a “true-false”
template, or a “multiple choice” template, they utilize powerful and complete
instructional strategy templates, based on your project needs. These include
clear definition of all instructional components and transactions needed to
completely instruct, practice, test and remediate at the objective level
(rather than the individual transaction level). Nor are these templates at all
like the “shell lesson” template approach, where an empty pattern lesson is
copied and then modified to accomodate the unique requirements of each
objective by adding or deleting frames and modifying branches, with the
attendant problems in debugging, testing, and revision. The sophisticated
instructional and learner control logics possible in these templates could not
be cost effectively addressed by this method, because of the staggering number
of branches that would have to be defined, modified, and maintained in any
deviations from the generic shell logic. (O'Neal and Owens, 1996)
The Instructional Systems Design (ISD) approach offers great potential for
improving not only the productivity of CBT development, but more importantly,
the instructional rigor and effectiveness of the result. One of the biggest
deficiencies in the so called “authoring systems” currently available, is that
they do not really help you “author”! In general, they offer you improved ways
to do things (such as creating graphics, analyzing a student response, etc.),
but they have little or nothing to say about what you should do. A true “authoring
system” would provide functionality and support in terms of “the right things
to do” instructionally, and it would provide help and support in “how to do the
things right”. In the full range of activities that must be carried out in the
authoring process from front end design to final validation and revision,
today’s authoring systems support a very narrow (but in the past, very
expensive) range of functions. (O'Neal, Fairweather, and Huh, 1988)
One of the major potentials for gain in design/development productivity and
instructional effectiveness lies in the area of correct classification of the
instructional objectives and their corresponding assignment to appropriately
selected and instructionally validated strategy templates. One of the greatest
sources of cost in training development is the ad hoc generation of large
numbers of idiosyncratic designs for instructional objectives. The creative
frenzy of the author must be controlled, for both cost and effectiveness
reasons. First, it takes time to develop creative designs for every objective.
Second, being idiosyncratic, the designs must be validated individually and
revised until effective. (Walker, O'Neal, and Campbell, 1989)
At the same time, it is important to avoid the trap of developing a generic,
"one size fits all" template, and applying it to all of the
objectives in a course. The definition and relationship between instructional
components in a lesson to teach procedures should be very different from those
of a lesson to teach a classification or discrimination skill, for example.
The templates ensure that the authors will “do the right things”. A growing
family of conversational interfaces to the templates ensure that the authors
will “do the things right”. For example, on one of the projects above, the
interface will automatically collect data into a data base for each lesson. It
will allow the authors to select the format they wish to use from a carefully
designed set of acceptable alternatives. Finally, it will require them to
supply additional information in terms of text (which it will format within the
template message standards), audio, video, and graphics. The templates are
natural structures for capturing performance information for management and
reporting purposes, and the "granularity" of management intervention
and reporting (including expert systems interventions and/or feedback links)
can be arbitrarily fine. (Gibbons, Fairweather, and O'Neal, 1993; Gibbons,
O'Neal, and Fairweather, 1996)
The combination of the Template/Generator approach with a multimedia database
offers significant opportunities for productivity in the areas of design,
development and quality control and testing. Some of the sources of this
productivity include:
1.
Scripting effort is greatly reduced. Since the instructional designs are
captured in the templates, authors don’t have to “invent” instructional
scripts, but rather they can focus on providing the well defined information
needed to complete each template, a much less time consuming job. It should
take about half as long to “script” a templated lesson as it would for the
author to invent an ad hoc treatment for a conventionally authored lesson.
2.
Instructional logic definition and lesson integration effort is greatly
reduced. A good rule of thumb in building and testing the branching logic for
interactive multimedia lessons is that these activities will consume
approximately 40% of your development budget. Once the templates are in place,
the 40% cost will be reduced to less than 5%.
3.
Furthermore, the more complex the instructional and control logic built into
the lessons, the more expensive and time consuming the quality control and
testing effort becomes, thus effectively building in a practical “ceiling” in
terms of how sophisticated a logic can practically be attempted within any given
budget. By building all branching decisions and mechanisms into the templates,
once the templates are tested and approved, quality control of lesson logic
will be minimal, since all branches were created “untouched by human hands,”
eliminating by far the largest single source of logic errors and expense. The
administrative and editorial costs of imposing and enforcing “project
standards” are also greatly reduced, since lesson logic and many dimensions of
“look and feel” issues are built into the templates, rather than left up to the
discretion of the individual authors. This too, reduces quality control costs.
4. Global
revision and repurposing costs are greatly reduced. Since the “look and feel”
parameters of the lesson environment can be easily manipulated independently of
the instructional content, it is very easy to repurpose a course for use by a
different client, without having to extensively “reauthor” the lessons. And yet
every frame can be significantly authored from the lesson environment utilities
to reflect the preferences of the new client in terms of screen layouts, color
palettes, customer logo, etc. It would not be unusual to completely adjust the
“look and feel” of a course, including new client logos and modification of
some of the global branching behaviors to meet the needs of a new client for
2-3% of the budget of the original course.
5.
Instructional rigor is improved. Since the templates allow the capture and use
of the best instructional design expertise available to the project, the least
experienced developer on the team can implement powerful and effective
instructional strategies. This improves student performance on the material and
reduces required revisions.
6. The
combination of the templates with the multimedia database allows the use of the
content for a wide range of other purposes. For example the content for a
procedure lesson can easily be reformatted from the data base by a “job aid
driver” to reuse the same information from the training segment as a job aid,
instead. Or, the same information could be accessed by a reference engine for
reference or research purposes. This capability offers advantages both ways.
Imagery and information originally created for marketing, documentation or
proposal purposes, could also be easily accessed and used in the training templates.
In many environments this “multiple use” capability can lead to considerable
additional productivity and cost sharing or cost avoidance.
Baer, L.H. and O'Neal, A.F., Very large scale production of CBI for military
training, Technology in Training and Education (TITE) conference paper and
proceedings, Biloxi, Miss., March 1988.
Fairweather, P.G. and O'Neal, A.F., The Impact of Advanced Authoring Systems
on CAI Productivity. Journal of Computer Based Instruction, Summer 1984.
(Also presented with demonstrations at Man and the Media: International AILA
Symposium on Research Tendencies in the Teaching of Foreign Languages with
Technical Aids, Frankfurt, W. Germany, June 1984.)
Gibbons, A.S., Fairweather, P.G. and O'Neal, A.F. The future of computer-managed
instruction (CMI), Educational Technology, May 1993.
Gibbons, A.S., O'Neal, A.F., and Fairweather, P.G., Management of
Instruction and Assessment in Aviation, in Designing Instruction for Human
Factors Training in Aviation, Avebury Press, Aldershot Hants, U.K., G. J. Hunt,
Ed., 1997.
O'Neal, A.F., Fairweather, P.G., and Huh Y.H. An
introduction to instructional systems design, paper presented at the
Follow-up Tri-partite Meeting of Occupational Standardization for Overseas
Workers, ILO Asian and Pacific Skills Development Program, United Nations, Goa,
India, 1988.
O'Neal, A.F., and Jennings, J. Automatic lesson generation: productivity and
instructional rigor, Defence Systems International: The Annual Review of
Air Systems, Sterling Publishing Group, London, 1989
O'Neal, A.F., and Owens, D. L., Design Requirements for Computer-Based
Learning Systems for Aviation, in Designing Instruction for Human Factors
Training in Aviation, Avebury Press, Aldershot Hants, U.K., G. J. Hunt, Ed.,
1997.
Walker, R.A., O'Neal, A.F., and Campbell, J.O. Automated lesson generation
for high volume computer based instruction - Phase II, SALT Conference on
Interactive Instruction Delivery, Orlando, Fla., 1989.
Island MultiMedia
Last Updated January 2003
For more
information, contact fred@whidbey.com.