Conference koolit::vms_curriculum

    I hope this is the correct note to discuss what follows.
    
      I have been working as an instructor in Ed Services for 10 years now. 
    I have seen many changes in the material and process by which courses
    are produced.  The most important changes I believe have been the
    modular design of courses and the use of VAX Document in their
    production.
    
      For the last 3 years, I have been quite involved in the customization
    of existing courses or development of new custom courses for customers. 
    This area for us (in Canada) is becoming more important and critical to
    meet our customer requirements.  In the past most customization
    involved either
    
    	a) giving the students all the student guides and teaching only
    	   the modules required
    
    	b) selecting only the modules to teach from the various courses
    	   putting them together into a single new student guide (often
    	   there was insufficient time to correct the page numbering)
    
    	c) Creating new material, by copying existing course material and
    	   entering it into VAX Document format
    
    If all new courses could be accessible in VAX Document source format,
    and using the various special "doctypes" for Ed Services, 
    a truly customized course could be developed from existing modules from 
    the required courses, and then integrated into a completely new student 
    guide.  This is very impressive to the customer, and emphasizes
    the quality in Ed Services products.  It also correctly satisfies the
    customer's training requirements.
    
      I believe that soon a large part of our business will involve the
    customization of "standard" courses to better fit the needs of the
    customers.  We have the tools to perform this now.  I am very glad and
    excited to see that the development people are starting in this
    direction.  Some people will say that we should not allow customization
    of courses since it may remove the uniformity that exists within Ed
    Services course at different training centers.  The reality is that
    there are differences between the various regions and countries in
    Digital.  Europe has always performed development and customization,
    and so have other countries, including Canada.  There is even
    customization performed by the different training centers in the same
    country.  Therefore it is a fact of life.  I feel that customization
    will become almost the norm.  Course development will produce material
    that the various countries and training centers can use to meet their
    own customer requirements.  As instructors in the future, our job will
    now involve producing and delivering the customize course.
    
      The tools I currently use are VAX Document, the special "doctypes"
    and DECwrite for producing figures.  This works well for me.  What ever
    tools are finally used, must be available to the various training
    centers for use in customization.
    
    David

    Customizing for customers - indeed!
    
    Yes - I think your are very right, as we are entering a phase where
    our service offer has to meet the customers requirements in a different
    way. Education will probably be a consultancy service adapted to the
    customers need, more than a information delivery session. 
    
    We are often asked to customize our on-site courses, and can foresee
    that this will probably be the norm in the future. The increasing usage
    of CBI and TBI, will emphasize this even more. Therefore it is
    important to have access to high quality educational materials, that
    can be easily adapted to the customers requirement. 
    
    Best.
    
    JOS. Svendsen  

    re: .1
    
    David,
    
    Good to hear from you. We are excited about the implications of
    modularizing our efforts also. It has the promise of making our jobs
    easier and more exciting.
    
    I hope you will continue to enter your thoughts and comments in here to
    give us a hand. Your input on what our 'object modules' should look
    like will be greatly appreciated. We can best meet your needs if you
    can criticise our efforts as we go, so we can fine tune the pieces we
    make available.
    
    Thanks again,
    
    Mel
    

Re the last couple...

You may be interested to know that the existing materials are available in 
source form via the designated Area and Country reps. This has been the case
for about 2 years. We have no plans to change this in the future, the only
difference will be that the sources will be in smaller 'chunks' which should
enable tailoring at a smaller granularity than before giving a better 'fit'
for the customers' need. We are also experimenting with different distribution
methods.

Cheers,

Andy