http://thejuniverse.blogs.com/afterhours/
2003/10/surviving_cours.html
June Lester is a mathematician and an educator, and one of the people brave enough to help facilitate the ‘blogtalk’ we tried over the last few weeks. She’s posted a great piece on the frustration a ‘SME’ can feel in the so-called ‘course-development wars.’ She’s right of course – subject matter experts in education have also often taught the material before and understand quite well how to communicate it’s intricacies, and treating them solely as providers of content will almost certainly produce a lesser learning experience (as well as antagonize them.) …
But I stand by the point I was trying to make earlier – clarifying roles and formally adopting a process can and does help to avoid unproductive conflict.
Looking back over the Xplana article I was reminded about a thread last June on the ITFORUM mailing list concerning the difference between instructional designers and instructional technologists. At least some of that seemed at play in the conflicts described in the article – it sounded like some of the disagreements or criticisms were less about “theories of learning” and more about what size graphics to use on a web page.
Buried within that mailing list thread was a reference to a relevant sounding article, “A Taxonomy of Instructional Technology Service Positions in Higher Education” (available here for those with a subscription). – SWL