eWEEK Magazine Judges Web Learning
Tools at UW-Madison
by Jennifer Smith, TTT Editor
From
April 11 to 13, eWEEK
magazine (formerly PC Week) hosted a competitive demonstration
of multimedia content development tools for the web called an "eWEEK
eVALuation" at UW-Madison's Engineering Hall. Vendors from four different companies--MindLever,
Hypercosm, NYUonline,
and Macromedia--came to demonstrate
their wares to an audience of administrators, faculty, and instructional technology
professionals.
For
the competition, all of the vendors were given identical curriculum materials
that they had to transform into a web learning module. The learning materials came in a package called
"Exploring the Nanoworld," developed by the Institute
for Chemical Education at UW-Madison.
This kit introduces students to the world of atoms and is aimed at
furthering science literacy. Cindy
Widstrand and Art Ellis, two of the kit's developers, were on hand to demonstrate
it for the audience.
On
Thursday, April 12, vendors gave one-hour demonstrations of their products,
focusing on functions, features, and issues like accessibility and compliance
with emerging standards like SCORM.
MindLever demonstrated its tool Composer, which provides a database
authoring environment. While MindLever
has thus far focused on the corporate market, it is now attempting to move
into the educational market. Locally-based
Hypercosm presented its strengths as producing 3-D content and showing how
physical processes and objects work. The NYUonline team gave the judges and observers a look at its forthcoming
product iAuthor, to be released for purchase in May. iAuthor works on an object model using the
SCORM concept of blocks to organize content.
The software also utilizes "role-based processing," in which
different types of authors--writers, graphic designers, subject experts, and
so on--have different access levels within iAuthor depending on their roles. Macromedia rounded out the day with a discussion
of how Authorware, Dreamweaver, and Flash can be used to create learning objects--or
"weapons of mass instruction," as one of the presenters quipped.
On
Friday, the proof was in the pudding as vendors gave 30-minute demonstrations
of the learning objects or lessons they had developed using their products
with the "Exploring the Nanoworld" content.
Teams were held to a 30-hour total limit for the development of these
learning objects (they had been presented with the curriculum materials on
Wednesday). Presenters were asked
to provide breakdowns of how much time each team member spent on specific
tasks. Judges were to evaluate these
presentations based on screen layout, animation, integration of learning principles,
opportunities for reinforcement or remediation of content, and their capability
of being assembled into courses. The judges' findings on the strengths and weaknesses of each tool
will be reported in the May 14 issue of eWEEK. Judges from UW System Administration included Judy Brown, Ed Meachen,
and Hal Schlais of the Office of Learning and Information Technology.
Patricia Ploetz of UW-Stevens Point and Jack Keel, Les Howles, and
Alan Wolf from UW-Madison also served as judges.
Part
of the rationale for holding this competitive evaluation stems from a recent
Forrester Research poll, in which the main obstacle to developing a successful
e-learning strategy was identified as a lack of interactivity. As a brief eVAL history circulated at the event
noted, today's educational institutions know how to manage and deliver online
learning, but much more needs to be done to create highly interactive learning
components. In fact, the definition
of interactivity surfaced occasionally during vendors' demonstrations.
Steve Lee of Allen Interactions, part of the Macromedia team, questioned
prevailing notions of interactivity and commented that it must involve more
than just clicking navigation buttons to move through a website.
He noted that the user must feel as if he or she is actually experiencing
things.
Official
results of the eVAL will be made available both in the print edition of eWEEK
and on its website. The event was
organized and hosted by the UW System,
the Academic ADL Co-Lab, and eWEEK.
