Continuous materials management is an ongoing commitment, requiring ongoing resourcing and financial support. Why bother?
Many academic publishers treat learning materials as lumps of static knowledge, produced in publications once for profit and then ignored, perhaps painfully exhumed at a later date when the potential value of their reuse is re-established.
Such publishers leave their materials to fall fallow between releases, occasionally releasing update or correction sheets to maintain reasonable currency and fitness for purpose.
We believe learning materials are live sources of explicit knowledge, requiring vendor independent formatting, regular and immediate maintenance and re-distribution, and long term management for posterity.
If students are being mislead by an inappropriate explanation in a workbook or module text, quality management dictates that corrections should be applied immediately and visibly across all forms of the course materials, all language versions, and in all delivery systems.
If authors are no longer present or unable to maintain their materials, the materials and the programmes based on them, must be secure for the departments, tutors and students dependent on them.
Significant amounts of time and effort go into creating quality learning materials. Today’s quality management and long term cost considerations require education providers to stop treating them like disposable commodities, and start cherishing them as explicit components of managed knowledge domains.
CourseworkerXML has been designed to help achieve this goal. Single source masters help in XML; formal revision and release control; rapid re-generation of new versions in all language forms; support for global digital distribution and uploading to your VLE; and monthly, volume based license and service fees, are all product features that implement the continuous updating goal.