E-Commerce Develops Fast
We use the word 'Courselets' to refer, at first, to the online course modules now being supplied by educational publishing companies ready for online delivery through major Course Management Systems (CMS), such as WebCT or Blackboard. These modules are generally designed to accompany a textbook, following its chapter structure, and providing additional resources and quiz questions.
Defined this way, Courselets are the latest manifestation of a trend, which began years ago in the publishing industry -- supplementing the traditional textbook with other instructional media, such as video, CD-ROMs, and, more recently, websites.
But even though they are in one sense, merely the next step in an evolutionary process, Courselets also represent a radically different capability. Due to the emergence and rapid adoption of Course Management Systems in post-secondary education, Courselets have the potential to move beyond supplementation and into outright replacement. Once it is installed inside a CMS, a Courselet is a complete stand-alone instructional vehicle. Students can interact directly with these Courselets-in-a-CMS as their entire credit-bearing experience, with minimal, if any, faculty involvement.
It is not inevitable that Courselets will lead education in this direction. More than ever before, however, the possibility exists for courses to be entirely commoditized and outsourced. Profit-making corporations would be the producers, educational institutions would be the middlemen, and students would truly be consumers.
Courselets are Here
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, publishing companies became multimedia producers, focusing on CD-ROMs as a readily distributable textbook supplement. Gradually the content development efforts shifted to the Web, so that by the late 1990s, all of the major educational publishers had created websites for most of the large enrollment undergraduate courses.
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