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Only a very small proportion of the people interested in open learning will ever need to master the technicalities of producing materials, and for them, there are a variety of other texts giving detailed advice (see, for example, Baath 1982; OU 1985; Lewis and Paine 1985; Rowntree 1986). A larger number of people may be involved peripherally in the planning or testing of materials and therefore need a broad knowledge of the whole process to understand where they 'fit in'. However, this chapter, and the following ones in this section, are mainly designed for the majority of consumers of open learning who will never be involved in production but who need to get a 'flavour' of the complexities of the production purpose for two reasons. First, so that they can make an informed decision about the quality of the materials being offered to them, and second, because an understanding of the complexities may persuade them not to embark on the process of production without a great deal of prior preparation and tra
ining.
The process of producing learning materials can be split into two parts-course creation and course production (see, for example Perry 1976; Perry and Rumble 1987). In broad terms, course creation is the label for the academic work involved in producing learning materials, whereas course production is the label for the reproduction of those materials. Another way of expressing the distinction is to say that course creation involves the making of one complete copy, at which point the course producers take over the reproduction of this 'master' copy. However, the two aspects are in practice usually intertwined and it is probably more useful to emphasise the importance of dialogue between course creators and producers, and the consequences which decisions about format, medium, style, etc. have for both the creators and the producers. So here I will use the generic term production for both phases and ask first: what and who are involved?
First, as in any educational programme, decisions have to be made about what you want to achieve, and second, how you are going to achieve it. Discussions over curriculum in any conventional course planning team will cover the same ground as in an open learning course team, but the aspect of 'how you are going to achieve it' may be relatively neglected. For example, if a seminar method is proposed it is unlikely that the teacher will be asked to specify exactly how she proposes to conduct each seminar. The result is that many course submissions expound on the philosophy of the course and the syllabus but leave the actual 'how' issue buried in phrases like 'teaching will involve a mixture of tutorial, lecture and seminar work'. But in planning materials production, such decisions must be spelt out to a much greater degree of detail, partly because materials are usually created as a joint enterprise involving several people with different skills and each piece of the 'jigsaw' has to fit together, but als
o because they may have enormous financial implications.
Because a complex team of specialists is involved it will be useful to consider who they are. The teaching role remains, and is central to the team, but it is a much bigger team than in conventional teaching. The principal roles, depending on the choice of media, are:
- author
- editor/transformer
- graphic designer
- artist
- media consultant
- administrator
What, briefly, do these roles involve?
The roles in production
The editor is almost certainly the most important and the one whose expertise I would most want to have 'in-house'. She will certainly be an expert in copy-editing, that is checking a finished text for typographical and stylistic accuracy. But much more important than that, she will understand how to transform ideas into teaching materials—how to take a bald fact and turn it into a question; to insert an activity just when the learner is getting bored; to put in a self-check question just when the learner is getting confused. Very few authors have the experience and understanding of open learning to do that, and fewer still can do it to their own work. Classroom teachers are rarely challenged on the point of their favourite joke or the use of their favourite anecdote, but the editor will challenge each one, asking 'What do you really mean? What are you trying to achieve? What are the learners supposed to do?' A salutary exercise for any teacher! The role of the editor is explored furth
er in Chapter 7.
The graphic designer will design the 'product' and is working on the side of the learner to make the package more intelligible and comprehensible. Ever since Marshall McLuhan told us that the medium was the message we have recognised the importance of presentation, but the graphic designer will persuade you that there are issues beyond 'Shall I write or type my OHPs?' She will advise on the use of fonts, of white space, of colour, of design, of the hundred and one things that turn ideas into packages. She will remind you that the audio-tape needs a label, that the package needs a wrapping, that the letter to your students should be in a complementary font to the text of the workbook. These should not be thought of as minor matters, as they are essential to the comfort, and therefore the motivation, of the learners and indeed to the whole educational experience. A change of font, for example, may signal to the learner a change in intellectual emphasis.
The artist has a smaller role than the graphic designer. She will be involved generally with producing illustrations for text including cartoons and line drawings. Some contact with the author remains essential because in producing a drawing from the author's note or 'stick' drawing the meaning may be changed. This is art in the service of education and it should be controlled by the author, although any sensible author will seek the artist's opinion on how a message can best be displayed.
The part played by the media consultant will depend on the media chosen; she will have expertise, usually, in media other than text, such as audio and video-tape. Except for people with a particular interest in such media, authors are dependent on the media consultant for good advice and would be wise to take it. Unfortunately, the advice is usually that the ideas and the budget are inherently incompatible. However, a good media consultant can often suggest an appropriate alternative which will achieve something worthwhile within budget. These issues are discussed further in Chapter 8.
The administrator is another very important person in production. Because so many people are involved and so many different activities need to be coordinated, good administration is essential. Let me give you just one example. For a simple text based package there might be, say three authors, an editor and a graphic designer. All their meetings will have to be minuted and decisions recorded. Each author will write at least three drafts of their material, each of which will have to be recorded, duplicated and distributed for comment in-house. In addition, distribution of some drafts will involve external critical readers and learner groups-all of whom have to be briefed and coordinated. All comments likewise have to be recorded, duplicated and distributed. Once a draft has been finalised, permissions have to be sought for copyright, artists have to be employed, artwork has to be recorded, duplicated and distributed. The administrator is therefore the backbone of the course production team
and this is reflected in the fact that the Open University has created a new grade of staff to fulfil many of these functions-the course manager. In small organisations the administrator will also liaise with the people involved in the reproduction of the master copy, such as printers. However, larger organisations will usually have a project control department which overviews and schedules the whole process.
The course team
How do all these people work together? The Open University model, which has been widely adopted, is to have a course team which works together throughout the production of the course and deals with all aspects of production.
Essentially each team was to consist of three groups of staff: academics, educational technologists and BBC production staff... the course team must not only create a course of quality and standard, they must create it at a time and a price consistent with the efficient functioning of the University as a whole.
Perry 1976
The exact way in which teams function varies even within the Open University. Some teams work so closely that the eventual text is credited simply to the course team. Other teams effectively delegate the writing task, within defined limits, to one member who retains the individual authorship—the normal form of words is something like 'prepared for the Course Team by Amy Bloggins'.
However, the Open University course team model is not the only possible way of organising the necessary human resources. Other models use much smaller course teams or use external authors and consultants working with a very small internal core team. Figure 3.1 sets out some of the possible models but these are, of course ideal types and in practice there are many more permutations.
The advantage of using external authors and consultants is that different specialists can be recruited as required. For the production of the Open University course P553, A Systematic Approach to Nursing Care, for example, apart from the internal academic who chaired the course team, all the academic members were recruited from outside the Open University. The Distance Learning Centre (DLC) also uses an extensive network of external authors but they are not generally involved in the internal course team but simply submit work according to a specification. The disadvantage of using external authors is that writing open learning materials is so specialised an activity that external authors rarely have the appropriate skills, and much editing and 'transforming' of materials needs to be done subsequently. This may lengthen the production time scale and consequently reduce some of the savings made by using consultants rather than maintaining a full-time academic team.
The course specification
What are the issues which the course team has to address? Whatever their chosen style of working, they have to agree a course specification. However, before they can make those decisions, they need detailed information on the resources available. Necessary resources include a substantial budget for staff costs and printing costs, but another less obvious consideration is the human expertise at your disposal. Expertise in open learning in general is readily available, but not in open learning for nursing. The lack of such skilled personnel is likely to inhibit the development of any project, as expertise will have to be 'home grown'.
The detail involved in the course specification should include the following as a minimum:
- The aims of the material: these can be formulated as objectives but there is considerable controversy within open learning about how far the use of objectives is appropriate. Certainly it is important to consider how far a general set of objectives is compatible with ideas about promoting individual growth and personal development.
- The intended study time: it is difficult to be accurate (and it is not always necessary to be so) but you do need to know whether the materials should take two hours or two weeks to study.
- A profile of the targeted learner, including ability level, previous experience, and motivation.
- Whether any human support will be available to the learner, such as a teacher or workplace mentor.
- The type of media to be used: choosing usually from a basic menu of text, audio-tape, video-tape, interactive video and computer programs. However, even the bald statement 'text' must be further refined to describe the length, the style of writing, the number and type of illustrations, etc.
- A pedagogic specification showing how the learner will relate to the materials and how flexible the materials may be.
- An outline design specification, giving some idea of whether photographs, line drawings, etc can be used.
- The production timetable. Statistically, a group of apes could write an excellent open learning text given sufficient millennia, but normally the timetable is a great deal shorter and decisions therefore need to be made about who is available for authoring, how the job will be allocated, etc.
- The quality control system: this is likely to involve the testing of the material by 'subject' experts and by representative users.
I now look at some of these aspects in more detail.
The targeted learner
Because of the costs of producing effective learning materials, they are designed for use by large numbers of students and it is therefore difficult to define your 'targeted' learner very precisely. This problem is exacerbated because of the emphasis on open access. Many conventional courses 'weed out' students who they don't think are quite right for the course, either by a simple rejection or by fairly directive 'counselling out'. But if an open learning system is designed to give everyone a chance, then the materials should be accessible in an intellectual as well as a physical sense to all the learners.
However, it could be argued, as with any vocational course, that the learner is not the only consumer of your learning material and the needs of their employers also need to be taken into account. This aspect may be exaggerated in the case of open learning materials because first, the high cost of production means that there may be a consortium of sponsors, not all of whom will agree about the desired end product and second, the learning materials will be highly visible. It is this visibility which sometimes subjects producers of open learning materials to unreasonable criticism and thereby renders them cautious. The Open University in particular has received criticism about its published materials and is consequently extremely careful. This problem has been described by Perry (1976) as occurring very early on in the life of the Open University, although he notes that they had, at the time of writing, avoided a major confrontation with the government, firms or public organisations. P
olitics (with a big 'P') is perhaps less likely to be an issue in nursing education but there is an issue of how far materials should represent the views of any particular group or faction. To take one example, should materials assume that professionalisation is to be welcomed: should they use the word 'profession' or the rather less loaded 'occupation'? Such semantic issues are relatively unimportant when any individual teacher might only reach an audience of say twenty or thirty or a hundred learners in a year, and that within one district. But when materials such as A Systematic Approach to Nursing Care have an estimated readership of over 60,000 over four years, then there may be conflict over the control of the content.
The type of media
Text is the obvious choice but it is not the only choice, so what are the criteria to be used? Learner needs should be the most important criterion, answering the question: how would it be most helpful for the learner to have this presented? This can be particularly important with aspects of the course which are most closely involved in 'real-life' situations. A discussion of the nursing process, for instance, should utilise documentation which reflects what is occurring on the wards. P553, A Systematic Approach to Nursing Care incorporates a set of 'case files' which includes patient details and notes in a realistic format.
However, the choice of media cannot be made in isolation from some concern about how the student is likely to cope with it. Video is certainly not universally available and neither are computers—certainly not ones able to use appropriate software. In addition, the time of use is important. Learners may want to study at home rather than in a library where audio-visual equipment might be available. Study in a nursing situation is perfectly possible using text, but might be more conspicuous or complicated with other technology.
Another important, and sometimes pre-eminent, criterion is cost. Some media are a great deal more expensive to use than others. Anything involving video is still very expensive, although the costs are reducing. However, audio tape can be fairly cheap and cheerful and provide some variety in a text based course. The DLC Diploma in Nursing, for example, uses an audio-tape of interviews with various people—including a group of schoolchildren—to run alongside a text based module on Images of Nursing (Robinson and Vaughan 1988). The problems of choosing appropriate media will be pursued in Chapter 8.
Pedagogic specification
This is the aspect of course production which will reflect the pedagogic views of the course team and determine where your materials will come within the family of 'open learning'. Materials can simply impart information and use in-text activities or self-assessment questions to help the learner work through the information. Alternatively they can entice the learner into a journey of self-discovery and skill acquisition in partnership with the author which will involve participation in more complex activities and more detailed contributions by the learner. The issue of whether the materials will be linear or non-linear, the style of presentation (chatty, academic, didactic, etc.) must be decided, and if there is more than one author, the degree of consistency which is required is also important.
The issue of the required homogeneity of style is an interesting one which concerns consumers as well as producers of materials. Thorpe comments about text writing in the Open University:
I think there has been a change in this respect among Open University course teams at least, which reflects the accumulation of years of experience with a very wide range of subject areas and course designs. It is probably true to say in the early years it was thought important that all units should achieve as near as possible a 'house style' of impersonal clarity and rationality, and that the course materials as a whole should have a uniform style. There is now a more sophisticated grasp of the difficulties of writing good teaching material, and of the indissolubility of style and content. Perhaps more important has been the realisation that for many students, differences of style can be stimulating and that units which give a sense of the personality behind the writing can make as positive a contribution to learning as others which do not.
Thorpe 1988
The production timetable
The production of open learning materials is basically an industrial process, despite the educational context. And for it to be efficient, each aspect of the work has to be very tightly scheduled. Slippage in any part of the system is potentially catastrophic and costly.
It might be thought that authoring will go to schedule if experienced teachers are used. After all, teachers are very used to being timetabled and begin to take it for granted. If they are scheduled to teach 'Research methods' at three o'clock on Wednesday afternoon then, in general, that's when it will happen regardless of whether fifteen hours or fifteen minutes has gone into the preparation for it. Most teachers are reasonably expert at 'muddling' through and if things don't go terribly well in one session then they can often be repaired later. However, an open learning context presents different problems. First, there is the pressure of the unseen audience of hundreds and thousands which, in theory are a spur to optimising standards but in practice may lead to complete 'writer's block'. If the author is in a situation where she is trying to combine open learning authoring with teaching face-to-face and dealing with the normal run of learners problems, then she will find it enormously difficult to
switch from reacting to the learners making current demands to proactive work for learners in the future whom she may never meet.
It is difficult to generalise about production time scales, except to say that they are almost always longer than anticipated, and of course it depends on which events are included in the timing and which methods are used in production. But in my experience it is difficult to go through all the stages of the basic text production process in less than one year, and two to three years is a much more realistic schedule for anything of any size. The steps of the production process for text based material are outlined in the next section.
Production stages
The following specification of production stages comes from the DLC. Other production centres will use slightly different stages but the principles will be similar. The system of drafts was developed by the Open University and has been widely adopted elsewhere.
- Basic specification produced, including aims and objectives.
- Author identified; objectives and content negotiated; author briefed about style; written directions given.
- Draft 0 produced, ie a statement of intent or outline. Discussed by course team.
- Draft 1 produced, ie the first presentation of 'complete' material. Discussed by course team and changes negotiated with author.
- Draft 2 produced incorporating the suggested changes and sent for developmental testing, critical reading and external appraisal.
- Comments collated and reviewed, author briefed.
- Draft 3 produced, reviewed by course team and either accepted or further revision proposed.
- Final vetting by external appraiser; handover to editor.
- Editor liaises with graphic designer and printing team (who should also have been involved in planning at earlier stages).
- Handover to printer and the cycle of proof correction.
- Publication.
Quality control
Systematic quality control in conventional teaching is really only in its infancy. In nurse education, for example, the English National Board began to look at performance indicators in the late 1980s. However, most producers of open learning materials have paid great attention to this aspect. Much of the credit for this must go to the Open University which has from the first insisted on excellence. There are two aspects to quality control of content in the production stage:
- critical reading by experts
- study by 'typical' learners.
Exactly how the first aspect is managed will depend on how the course team is constituted; critical reading by experts should start in-house with the sharing of drafts amongst colleagues for comment and rewriting, but it should always be followed by the perusal of drafts by experts from outside the institution. They can be asked both to check the contents of the material for accuracy and bias but also to evaluate it as teaching material. This latter aspect may prove difficult; critical readers may find it impossible to think like a learner and may comment 'this is too simple' or 'why didn't you pursue this idea further' without really thinking through what can reasonably be expected of a learner in the time available. The 'high profile' aspect of learning materials also comes to the fore again. Critical readers may have a slight worry that these materials may be seen by people who might 'judge' the state of nursing knowledge by them; they think that they should reflect the 'best' in nursing. But mater
ials have to connect with the learners and their concerns otherwise they may leave them far behind. Most critical readers are asked to look at just one particular aspect of the materials where they have expertise. However, there is often also an appraiser, who oversees the whole rather than just the parts to make sure that it 'hangs together' both in terms of a correct approach to the topic and of being appropriate teaching material for the intended audience.
Developmental testing by learners is equally important, especially in the early stages of an open learning production programme when the authors might not have got a 'feel' for their audience. The learners should ideally reflect all the possible types who might eventually do the course and therefore, for most courses in nursing, just one group of testers is insufficient. The DLC's Managing Care programme was very extensively tested throughout the country and the feedback led to some radical redrafting. However, getting sufficiently critical feedback can be a problem-nurses seem conditioned to be polite. Ideally, of course, the author should go and meet the developmental testers to extract more acerbic comments but this isn't always possible. However, it is very salutary for any author to listen to learners discussing a draft-what seemed obvious to the author may be highly obscure to the learner. A more sophisticated type of developmental testing involves learners working through an entire course, tha
t is the materials plus what support would normally be available, in a simulation of the real thing. Thorpe (1988) describes such a model of testing used within the Open University to overcome the problems of less structured testing, which she formulates as:
- the testers are not comparable with eventual learners
- the testers do not use the materials and try to learn 'for real'
- a high proportion of testers drops out
- the feedback is inconsistent
- the data will relate only to the learners' views on the materials and not whether they have learnt anything.
Despite the inadequacies of some models of developmental testing it is an extremely important part of the quality assurance process. However, it is responsible for a major part of the cost of production, both because there are direct costs (travel costs, duplication of materials, etc.) and indirect, but substantial, costs of lengthened timescales.
Making or borrowing?
The Open University has put a great deal of effort into developing ideas about the production of materials and clearly has a great deal of expertise. It is regularly criticised, however, for being too expensive, for 'making a fuss about nothing'. 'Anyone', it is said, 'can produce learning materials, especially in these days of desk-top publishing'. Certainly the introduction of sophisticated document processing software at a reasonable price has opened up a number of possibilities, and many nurse teachers are producing learning materials for their students using the technology available in their school or college. Sometimes, they are keen to recover their costs by selling these materials elsewhere. However, as soon as the materials are used in a context not controlled directly by the author then they become standalone products which, if their users are not to be confused, misinformed and generally 'put-off' open learning, must meet the sort of production standards described above, which are expensive
. The Open Tech programme, for example, started with great ideas about how the costs of production could be reduced, but many projects learnt the hard way that quality also suffered, although simple training materials are cheaper to produce than materials dealing with complex ideas and competencies.
Because of the complex nature of production and the high set-up cost of establishing an in-house production unit, the obvious solution within nurse education (cf Dixon 1987) is to buy-in materials from specialist production centres such as the Open University and the Distance Learning Centre. These materials need not be produced specifically for nursing; they could be interdisciplinary or concerned with a generic issue such as management. There are a number of data bases which give information about materials which are available (for example, MARIS-NET, including a specialist nursing facility run by the ENB Resource and Careers Service. However, all such materials should be evaluated with regard to the nature of the production process and particularly the quality control process. Information about this may not be given explicitly but acknowledgements may be made to teams of developmental testers and to critical readers. Unfortunately it is not always easy to know how well materials will function in pr
actice just by looking at them, but producers should be willing to pass on the names of other users who may have helpful advice. It would be extremely useful if producers produced more accounts of how the materials have been used and in what contexts.
Materials imported into a particular situation might need to be adapted for use in a number of ways. Again, there is a useful literature on the process of adaptation (Lewis and Paine 1986; Stainton Rogers 1987). As Stainton Rogers notes, some teachers feel almost compelled to change materials before they can use them, either to prove their autonomy or their conscientiousness but there are also sound educational reasons for making different degrees of change. She categorises these changes as:
- Transformation, which consists of re-working and reformulation such as rewriting text, using a different medium, changing the form (eg putting a diagram onto an OHP transparency). Changes may include level of difficulty, degree of specificity, or the context used.
- Selection, where some parts of the material are chosen as appropriate, and others discarded, to ensure that students only tackle that which is appropriate.
- Augmentation by introducing additional material or input, to make the materials more up-to-date, topical, locally relevant, or to increase conceptual depth or specificity.
- Integration whereby materials are linked to other teaching inputs so that students experience coherent learning rather than a series of isolated and even conflicting elements.
Stainton Rogers 1987
She argues that the first two categories are simply possibilities which may be considered and need to be handled with care: however, the last two categories should always be carried out when materials are brought into a situation for which they were not specifically designed. However, this takes us into the realms of learner support which are dealt with in Part Three.
References
Baath, J.A. 1982 Some possibilities of attempting to fulfil instructional functions. In Holmberg, B. and Baath, J.A. Distance Education: a short handbook. Liber-harmods, Malmo.
Dixon, K. 1987 Implementing Open Learning in Local Authority Institutions. Further Education Unit/Open Learning Branch (MSC).
Lewis, R. and Paine, N. 1985 How to Communicate with the Learner. Council for Educational Technology, Open Learning Guide 6.
Lewis, R. and Paine, N. 1986 How to Find and Adapt Materials and Elect Media. Open Learning Guide 8. Council for Educational Technology.
OU 1984 P553 A Systematic Approach to Nursing Care. The Open University Press.
OU 1985 P517 Making Self-instructional Materials for Adults, Checklist 3. The Open University Press.
Perry, W. 1976 Open University. The Open University Press.
Perry, W. and Rumble, G. 1987 A Short Guide to Distance Education. International Extension College. 2nd edition.
Robinson, K.S.M. and Vaughan, B. 1988 Images of Nursing. Distance Learning Centre.
Rowntree, D. 1986 Teaching Through Self-Instruction. Kogan Page.
Stainton, Rogers W. 1987 Adapting materials for alternative use. In Thorpe, M. and Grugeon, D. (eds.) Open Learning for Adults. Longman.
Thorpe, M. 1988 Evaluating Open and Distance Learning. Longman.
MARIS-NET
Run by MARIS (Materials and Resources Information Service) 1 St Mary's Street, Ely CB4 4ER.
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