267

Teachers as educational software designers:industry/university co-operation

Sandra WillsUniversity of Melbourne, Parkoille, Victoria 3052, Australia

Abstract. Funding was obtained in 1989 to develop a pilotelective in 1990 within the Graduate Diploma of ComputerEducation at The University of Melbourne. Entitled "Desig­ning Educational Software", the elective takes advantage ofnew authoring tools and multimedia facilities to introduceteachers to the philosophies and practicalities of developingsoftware for the classroom.

This in itself is not innovative. However, the elective willbe not only offered to teachers enrolled in the GraduateDiploma but to trainers from industry as well, particularlythose involved in Computer Based Training. CST is a careerpath for teachers that has not yet been exploited and at thesame time, the CST industry reports skills shortages. Theelective has been designed in co-operation with the CET indus­try.

A second aim of the course is to expose industry trainersto the educational philosophies behind school level software.From the interaction of schoolteachers and industry trainers,we shall attempt to develop broader models of CST than theones currently embraced by the training industry. Likewise,the development of school software should benefit from expo­sure to the more sophisticated facilities available in industry.

The pilot is continuing in 1991 and the teachers will bejoined by a smaller number of enrolments from the trainingindustry. By 1992, the percentage of teachers to industrytrainers will be 50/50.

Keywords: teacher training, computer based training, educa­tional software

Sandra Wills, currently a lecturer inthe Institute of Education at TheUniversity of Melbourne, has beenworking with computers, students, andteachers for almost twenty years, atprimary, secondary, and universitylevel. She was one of Australia's earli­est educational software developersand has also worked at times in thecomputer industry in various jobs, in­cluding marketing manager, softwareconsultant, and CBT author. The phi­losophy presented in this paper of

breaking down barriers between schools and industry, is onereflected in Sandra's career.

Sandra has been Australia's representative on TC3 since1985. She is National Education Chairman for the AustralianComputer Society and a founding member of the AustralianCouncil for Computers in Education. She was InternationalProgramme Chairman of WCCE/90, IFIP TC3's fifth WorldConference on Computers in Education, held in Sydney in1990.

Education & Computing 7 (199[) 267-272Elsevier

1. Background

1.1 Victorian Education Foundation

The Victorian Education Foundation (VEF) wasestablished by the Victorian state governmentand is funded by industry from 0.1% of their payroll tax. The scheme is voluntary and is designedto enable industry to create training and educa­tion solutions more in line with their needs. YEP

funding enables innovative training to get off theground quickly and fills a gap until the training isintegrated into the normal offerings of collegesand universities.

The Institute of Education at the University ofMelbourne submitted a proposal in conjunctionwith the CST industry to the YEP. We were grantedan Education Innovation Award, Applied Re­search Program: Information Technology. Theproposal was for the development, within theInstitute's Graduate Diploma of Computer Edu­cation, of a pilot course on Designing Educa­tional Software which would attract both teachersand industry trainers,

1.2 The Institute of Education

The Institute of Education is one of Australia'slargest teacher training institutions. It offers aGraduate Diploma in Computer Education, a twoyear part-time diploma for experienced teacherswhich can qualify them for Ministry of Educationregistration as Computer Science teachers. How­ever the diploma also attracts teachers from allsubject disciplines, primary and secondary, inter­ested in applying computing across the curricu­lum. On average the new intake is 60-75 teachersper year. With such a large intake, the diploma isable to offer a number of electives in addition toits core units.

The Graduate Diploma of Computer Educa­tion (oocs) does not currently include an electiveon Designing Educational Software. The last timethe diploma was re-designed it was common be-

0167-9287/91/$03.50 © 1991 - Elsevier Science Publishers B.V. All rights reserved

268 S. Wills I Teachers as educational software designers

lief that teachers should not be developing soft­ware. In earlier years of the diploma some teach­ers chose to develop educational software as theirmajor project using tools such as PILOT or pro­gramming in BASIC. However the GDCE projectsupervisors generally discouraged most teachersfrom software development as it was found thatthe time and effort required to develop the soft­ware far exceeded the time available in the year.

Recently tools have become available thatmake this activity more accessible to teachers.The Macintosh is used widely throughout theuniversity and GDCE students are being intro­duced to Hypercard as a core component of thediploma, along with Logowriter, a successor toLogo. The teachers' first projects with Logowriterand Hypercard automatically veer towards"software that teaches". It is the knowledge do­main they know best.

In addition to new tools making it easier todevelop educational software, there have beenrapid developments in the area of multimedia.The new tools automatically encompass multime­dia. Part of the resurgence of interest in educa­tional software can be attributed to the excite­ment caused by the demonstrated potential ofmultimedia software. In 1990, The University ofMelbourne established an Interactive MultimediaLaboratory. Its main function is to professionallydevelop academic staff of the university in creat­ing multimedia presentations and courseware.Originally it was envisaged that the 1990 pilotelective for teachers would focus on developingmultimedia software, however the facilities werenot available in time for the start of the elective.

1.3 The Computer Based Training industry

Computer Based Training is a rapidly growingsector of the training industry. Many major com­panies have now passed the exploratory stagestypical of early pilot CET projects and have inte­grated CBT into their training departments. Inaddition to people employed within companytraining departments, a number of CBT companieshave been spawned, specialising in the develop­ment of CBT under contract. Several CBT author­ing tools have been developed in Australia andare widely used in addition to the well-known

imported authoring packages. Victoria has an ac­tive CBT association: the Computer Based Train­ing Association of Victoria (CBTAV) which meetsregularly and publishes a newsletter.

There are a number of barriers to the accep­tance of CBT including cost of implementationand development, cost of computer equipment,opposition to change, and lack of experienced,innovative CBT developers. All CBT companiesand organisations using CBT acknowledge a skillsshortage in the area of CBT authors.

CBT authoring requires an interesting and raremix of skills: a knowledge of instructional design,ability to program, understanding of educationaltheory, an eye for screen design or user interface,and familiarity with new hardware and softwareadvances that impact on learning. Generally, peo­ple employed as CBT authors have to betrained/retrained by their employer. Authors aresourced from three areas:CD the schools or training area, with little or no

experience of computing, or vice versa, from(ii) the computing area, with little practical un­

derstanding of education and training con­cerns, or from

(iii) The knowledge domain of the CBT to bedeveloped, for example, bank teller, againwith little understanding of computing ap­plied to education.

There are no courses at Australian universitiesfor training CBT authors. They are usually trainedin-house.

Each year one or two ODCE graduates leaveteaching for the Computer Based Training indus­try even though the diploma has not formallytrained them for this. CBT is a career path forteachers that has not yet been exploited and atthe same time, the CBT industry reports skillsshortages.

Therefore the aim of the proposal to the VEF

was to develop a course which would cater for theneeds of both teachers and the CBT industry. Theelective has been designed in co-operation withthe CST industry.

A second aim of the course was to exposeindustry trainers to the educational philosophiesbehind school level software. From the interac­tion of school teachers and industry trainers, weare attempting to develop broader models of csrthan the ones currently embraced by the trainingindustry. Likewise the development of school

S. Wills I Teachers as educational softwaredesigners 269

software should benefit from exposure to themore sophisticated facilities available in industry.

2. Description of 1990 pilot elective

In 1990, the pilot elective was available onlyfor current students of the GDeE. No CBT authorsfrom industry were to be enrolled until the coursehad been developed and trialled. The 1990 GDCE

students were used as "guinea pigs". It was runas part of an existing elective called "GeneralPurpose Software Tools". The rationale was thatauthoring languages can be described as generalpurpose software tools.

Instead of the 20 students normally enrolledfor an elective, we allowed 40 to enrol and rantwo streams of the elective, Stream 2 being" De­signing Educational Software". In 1990 15 en­rolled in Stream 2. To satisfy the accreditationrequirements of General Purpose Software Tools,there were some lectures common to both streamsand one common assignment. The assessmentconsisted of three minor assignments and onemajor assignment.

The elective ran over sixteen weeks-one anda half hours per night, one night per week, forone semester. In addition there were in total fiveweeks holiday during the course which enabledteachers to spend time on developing their majorproject. The course included two guest lecturesfrom the CBT industry and a visit to a majorbank's training centre was scheduled. The visitwas unfortunately cancelled at the last moment,

We used "meta-car" as a teaching strategy inthe course: CBT to learn about CBT. We usedMicro-Energy's Creating CST: a Developer's Guide.Micro-Energy was one of the other four winnersof a VEF Education Innovation Award in 1989.Their award was for creating a CBT developer'sguide. The guide consists of a book and 3 disks.The disks contain examples of CBT illustrative ofthe points they make in the book. In return forfree access to the draft guide, the teachers in theelective evaluated Micro-Energy's package. Threeweeks were allocated to this activity.

The last half of the course was spent workingon the major project. The major assignment was ateam project to design and develop a CBT unitusing the authoring tool, Author. Author is a

Victorian product by Microcraft. It is well-knownin the Victorian CBT industry and has many userselsewhere in Australia and overseas. Author wasprovided at reduced cost to the pilot course as acontribution from industry.

The assignment was a team project, not onlydue to the constraints of time but, because mostsoftware development in the "real world" is ateam development and teachers, used to the au­tonomy of their own classrooms, in general areunused to working in teams.

Class contact time was given over to the teamprojects instead of lectures. This was for a num­ber of reasons. We were using IBM PS /2 machineswith VGA colour to give the teachers access toeffects they may not have seen on school-levelmachines. Normally teachers in the oocs spendmany hours in their own time on GOCE projects,however they did not have access to these ma­chines outside the university. In addition our sitelicence for the authoring language did not extendto a home licence and authoring languages arenot found in schools. Hence their only access tothe machines, and to the other teachers in theirteams, was confined to class time. Although wewere giving teachers experience of things notnormally encountered in schools, the decisionswe made restricted their progress with their pro­jects.

On the last night of the course, members ofthe CBT industry were invited to attend to see theteachers' presentations of their team projects.Each project was evaluated by all in attendanceusing a proforma and copies of all the completedevaluations were posted to the teachers after­wards.

The minor assignments included a writtenevaluation of Micro-Energy's Creating CST and aliterature review. The bibliography is attached.Some of the students in this elective attended CBT

90, a mini-conference run in conjunction withWCCE 90, the Fifth World Conference on Com­puters in Education held in Sydney in July 1990.They commented on the technical sophisticationof the applications demonstrated but felt thatmany lacked a sound underlying educational phi­losophy, or at least the philosophy was not inkeeping with the ones held by teachers. This is atheme that we intend to address in more depth asthe elective increases its enrolments of industryauthors in 1991 and 1992.

270 S. Wills / Teachers as educational software designers

3. Evaluation of 1990 pilot elective

An evaluation form was distributed and re­turned by 12 ofthe 15 students. The following areexcerpts from the evaluation.

Why did you enrol in the elective?

"actually learning about something which isused in industry interested me"; "to ascertain useof CBT languages in schools"; "had to do some­thing and this topic seemed to have some purposeto it"; "I thought it would be useful if I needed ajob in industry and because I thought it would beinteresting"

On a scale of 1 to 5 please rate you feelings:

1 strongly negative 2 negative 3 no comment 4 positive 5strongly positive

The elective as a whole Average rating- your enjoyment of the elective as a whole 4.3- the usefulness of the elective to you 4.0- the assessment as a whole 3.5- content of the elective 4.1- structure of the elective 3.5- the lecturer 4.2- your desire to continue work in this area 4.4

The components of the elective- Micro-Energy's Creating CBT-the book 3.6- Micro-Energy's Creating CBT-the disks 3.3- evaluating Micro-Energy's Creating CBT 3.3- learning "Author" 4.6- the literature review 2.9- guest speaker l-(CBT Design) 4.4- guest speaker 2-(Author) 4.3

What did you like best about the elective?

"working with Author"; "working in teams";"seeing other teams' presentations"; "finishingthe CBT project and seeing it work"

What did you not like about the elective?

"amount of work involved"; "literaturereview"; "not enough time/support when writ­ting our CBT"; "IBM'S weren't available all thetime"; "software not lent out-big minus"; "mis-

sing out on the industry visit"; "problems withthe network"

Would you be interested in working in the CBT

industry-full or part-time?

Full-time 3; Part-time 3; Either 3; Maybe 2;No O.

4. Future developments

The Graduate Diploma of Computer Educa­tion has been re-designed for 1992 and containsan elective titled "Designing Educational Soft­ware". The pilot course funded by the VEF helpedto ensure that this aspect of educational comput­ing was addressed in the new Graduate Diploma.It raised awareness of the previous gap.

The pilot is continuing in 1991 and the teach­ers will be joined by a small number of enrol­ments from the training industry. We will allowenrolments of 5 fee-paying students from indus­try. By 1992 the percentage of teachers to indus­try trainers will be 50/50.

The elective will run in its own right withoutVEF funding in 1992 as it will be fully integratedinto the ODCE. It may be possible to run it twiceper year in 1992 as it would be self-funding dueto the fees paid by industry trainers.

In 1991 we are ironing out the problems en­countered in the 1990 elective such as providing ahome licence for the authoring language. Theelective will include much more emphasis on in­teractive multimedia. We will provide the stu­dents with a choice of authoring systems. Eachteam will be using a different combination ofmachines, peripherals and authoring languages,for example Macintosh with Authorware Profes­sional, Hypercard for re-purposing an existingvideodisc, Amiga with Amigavision etc. An im­portant aspect of the elective for the teacherscould then be a comparative evaluation of thedifferent systems.

This, however, requires the lecturer to main­tain a high level of skills across a range of rapidlychanging machines and tools. We may thereforeoccasionally have to utilise the resources of anumber of specialist consultants to cover eacharea. We are seeking the co-operation of industryto provide the consulting free of charge.

S. Wills / Teachers as educational softwaredesigners 271

Whatever authoring language is chosen, it isimportant that it is easy and quick to learn other­wise too large a proportion of the shortsemester-length elective is spent on learning thelanguage rather than on applying it and on dis­cussing the educational basis of the students'designs. The feedback proformas indicated thattoo many of the designs in the first pilot were ofthe traditional tutorial mode.

In 1991 we are organising the team project intwo stages. The first stage would allow the teamsto design and author traditional CBT, recognisingthat this is probably all that is possible when somuch of their energy is focussed on learning anew language. After feedback from peers andfrom industry, the second stage would encouragethem to return to their design to develop a pro­posal for tackling the knowledge domain from adifferent angle using an alternative learning strat­egy and alternative user interface.

5. Conclusion

Teachers do not need to design educationalsoftware in order to be able to use computerseffectively in their classrooms. However theyshould be provided with the opportunity to learnthe skills if they desire. Some may develop fortheir own classrooms. Some may go further todevelop on behalf of their Ministry of Educationfor other teachers' classrooms. Some may even goon to develop educational software as a businessor migrate to the CST industry. The tools toenable teachers to design software without beingexpert programmers are becoming more accessi­ble.

The paper has described a different approachto the problem of training teachers about design­ing educational software. The approach attemptsto address the needs of the CBT industry as wellas the needs of teachers. In doing so, a number ofbenefits accrue to the teachers. It raises teachers'awareness of alternative career paths. It exposesthem to models of adult learning, to alternatemodels of software design, to the project manage­ment concerns of large scale CBT development,and to sophisticated technologies not readilyavailable in schools. The interaction with industrytrainers, highlights issues of instructional design

and user interface. It enables them to comparethe politics of innovation in schools with those ofthe workplace. In providing a "real-world" per­spective on the use of computers for training,hopefully teachers begin to place computers forlearning in a broader context than their ownclassrooms.

References

[1] S. Ambron and K. Hooper, eds., Interactive Multimedia:Visions of Multimedia for Developers, Educators and Infor­mation Providers (Redmond, Microsoft Press & AppleCompuler, 1988).

[2) S. Lumb, H. Vorrath and P. Juliff, Creating CBT: a Devel­oper's Guide (Micro-Energy Ltd, Melbourne, 1989).

[3] D. Tinsley and T. van Weert, eds., EducationalSoftware atlite Secondary Leoel (North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1989).

[4] A. Mc Dougall and C. Dowling, eds., Computers in Educa­tion (North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1990).

[5] 1. Moonen and T. Plornp, eds., Eurit '86: Developments inEducational Software and Courseware (Pergamon, Oxford,1987).

[6] T. Plomp, K. van Deursen and 1. Moonen, eds., CAL forEurope (Elsevier, Amsterdam, 1987).

[7] C. Rivlin, R. Lewis and R. Davies Cooper, eds., Guidelinesfor Screen Design (Blackwell, London, 1990).

[8] R. Sims, ed., CBT Issues (Australian Society for Comput­ers in Learning In Tertiary Education, Sydney, 1990).

[9] A Guide to the Design and Deuelopment of EducationalSoftware (Commonwealth Schools Commission, Canberra,1985).

Discussion

Marilyn Dickson: How did teachers decide thecontent of the team project (to develop softwareusing an authoring program)?Sandra Wills: They chose to create software forthe curriculum area in which they worked. Thesoftware was not always created to fil! an educa­tional need - sample titles of the projects in­clude "The Solar System" and "Desktop Publish­ing".Yaacou Katz: What is the philosophy regardingthe connection between Business and Education?Sandra Wills: There should be more interactionbetween the two in this field, and we hope thatthere will be, with a higher ratio of business/in­dustry students in this course. I don't think thatsoftware created for business and industry train­ing will always be helpful to educators, but the

272 S. Wills ! Teachers as educational software designers

design ideas used for the creating the softwareare certainly helpful.Joan Haner: Did any of your first students in thiscourse develop projects other than tutorial soft­ware? Was the software structured in design?Sandra Wills: Most of the first projects were closeto electronic page turning, and we found that thestudents needed more background in art andgraphics to design good software. The creation ofgraphics took a great deal of time.

David Benzie: I've found similar problems withauthoring tools in general. It takes more timethan most teachers realize, and their efforts areregressive at first. It takes lots of time to createsoftware with authoring tools.Sandra Wills: Better authoring tools may makethe difference. Although what our students pro­duced wasn't professional-looking, they learned alot. Their next efforts would probably be better.