« Characteristics of Leading Innovators (Part V) »

This multi-part Executive Briefing was prepared exclusively for university-level senior decision-makers. The writing assumes progressive organizational experience leading to a senior position in a college or university setting.

Part V of this Executive Briefing identifies characteristics of leading innovators related to content management.

When kicking off an InterEd Executive Retreat, we often begin with a précis of the characteristics common to successful adult-centered and professional programs, leading innovators, if you will. By “successful programs,” I mean that the program enjoys affirmative control of its direction, and routinely sets and achieves its growth and quality targets.

[NB: These characteristics represent a slightly idealized concatenation of a handful of institutions. Excluding possibly one or two for-profits, I am unaware of a single institution that possesses all of these characteristics in full form.]

Characteristic #5 – Efficiently Managed Content 

Successful institutions have created an infrastructure, roles, and business rules with which to develop and manage content. The leading edge of development for these institutions involved migrating toward structured, reusable, and scalable content.

In the early phases of these developments, the institution’s leaders assured concerned faculty that structured content increased rather than detracted from individual choice in the classroom. Structured content brings modern learning sciences to the education process (where it should already have been) and ensures efficient learning with appropriate compression as desired.

Learning objects ensure that a minimum set of objectives, activities, and assessment metrics and rubrics will be available to each instructor, thereby freeing instructors to build upon or modify in accordance with their particular strengths and interests while ensuring that the floor is maintained with respect to common outcomes that define the degree.

Of course, it is the faculty who make up the bulk of the SME core (subject-matter experts). SMEs develop the structured content and, most often, they serve in teams under separate contract managed by the learning and technology expert.

A few institutions have fully implemented system-wide content development and management systems. These institutions are now enjoying the benefits of higher quality content, activities that are more engaging, better assessments, increased learning, shorter time-to-deployment for new courses, more easily maintained course updates, and substantially reduced build-out and management costs; others are well on their way. This Characteristic is a leading-edge frontier that confers many benefits on early-adopters. 

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Part VI of this Executive Briefing will identify characteristics related to efficiently managed content.