Usually when I spend a week at a conference I then spend a couple of weeks following up by re-reading some of the presentations, looking at online presentations that I wasn't able to attend, and thinking about my own presentation.
At the WCET Conference in San Diego I presented a paper as part of a panel on "EduResources Online--a New Era of Course Development." My fellow presenters were Jim Zimmer, the Director of the Academic Development Centre at Mt. Royal College, and Vicky York, the Distance Learning Librarian for Montana State Universities. I presented from the perspective of a developer of a referatory portal; Jim Zimmer presented the viewpoint of a center for teaching and learning director facilitating the use of online resources; Vicky York presented the library approach to locating and using online instructional materials.
Our presentations and discussions were in agreement that the effective use of repositories by faculty will be highly dependent upon the assistance that instructors receive from local instructional support staffs. Finding and evaluating instructional resources is not easy; adapting online resources to an individual instructor's course is time consuming and can be technically challenging. Simply getting instructors to consider online instructional resources as a useful and important option is the first and most difficult task.
We disagreed somewhat on what will be the most successful format for instructional repositories: should they be organized around learning objects or around courses? Both Jim and Vicky were inclined to favor the MERLOT or CAREO style of repository as a collection of learning objects. My own view is that the MIT OpenCourseWare collection may prove to be more viable for most higher education instructors because the learning objects are embedded within courses, full contextualization is provided and the objects are located through courses rather than through an independent search for objects. (John Paul Pott's presented a progress report at the conference about OCW and about other institutions that are starting to adopt the OCW approach; his presentation "A New Model for Open Sharing" is available online at the WCET conference site.)
Of course this course-centered point of view is contrary to that taken by many of the proponents of the object-centered point of view such as Stephen Downes. I don't really disagree with Downes that it's desirable to have learning objects that can be re-used and re-purposed outside of courses; however, I do doubt that most faculty will adopt this approach. In my view the course-centered approach will continue to dominate higher education for a very long time (for decades) so it's more effective to introduce learning objects to instructors within the context of complete courses. The object-centered emphasis fits better within the training and development approach found in corporations, in vocational training, and in military settings than within colleges and universities. Since we are still early in the development of online instructional resources, it's certainly desirable that both approaches be further expanded, tested, and supported.
Whichever approach is taken for repositories, the problem of locating online instructional resources will soon increase to overwhelming levels. Even the largest repositories now contain only thousands of resources; soon they will contain tens of thousands and then hundreds of thousands. This rapid growth will require further assistance in locating and evaluating resources. The availability of software such as the Scout Portal Toolkit, DSpace, and others to facilitate the creation of repositories and referatories by individual instructors, local departments, local programs and individual institutions will further multiply the complexity of locating and evaluating sought-after resources. As I commented in my talk, "The most important repository is the one that has what you're looking for, or the one in which you discover something useful and interesting that you weren't looking for." The big question is how to make those discoveries.
Jim Zimmer, Vicky York and I were in agreement, at the end of our presentation and after hearing questions and comments from the audience, that perhaps the title of our our panel should have ended in a question mark, "A New Era in Course Development?" Whether this new era transforms and improves higher education with improvements in the design and quality of courses, with new paradigms for course development and instruction, and with significant opportunities for deepening the scholarship of instruction remains to be seen. The availability of digital instructional resources offers new opportunities. How much those opportunities will be used and developed is not yet known.
9:47:41 AM 
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