Why we need Collaborative e-Content Development ?

As far as Learning Content Management Systems are concerned, content development and maintenance is a major challenge especially in technical education which changes occur rapidly due to technological advancements with time. The cost of e-content development could not be bearable to many small technical and vocational training institutes and student motivation could therefore reduce with outdated and less quality contents. Furthermore it was forecasted that especially the Asian market of eLearning will have remarkable growth rate of 17.3% a year and the potential for content development will exponentially grow till 2018. In order to overcome the vacuum in the content development needs arise due to high rate of growth, it is required to propose rapid content development model without deteriorating the quality aspects.

One solution to cater this challenge in content development is to establish collaborative content development strategy, model and suitable mechanism for collaboration. The developed content needs to be supported in delivery of courses in technical education which need about sixty percent of practical aspects and forty percent of knowledge component. The online content therefore should support suitable interactivity to fulfill the behavioral component in the context of skills, required to perform the tasks related to the competency while in conformity with existing standards such as SCROM.

Objectives-driven eContent Structuring and Deployment Model (ODC-SDM) presented by Omwenga et. al. (2005) enables logical breaking-up and sequencing of the content model and could be used to break up a course in to Course Objectives, Module Objectives, Unit Objectives and Topic objectives etc. and facilitates only the cognitive knowledge component. But in technical education, it is required other components of the competency; skills and attitudes to be incorporated in to the content which would have to be considered in the development process.

 Therefore it is necessary to focus on developing a comprehensive model for the content development through collaborative means. This will eventually reduce the time and cost for development and improve the quality of content by introducing the peer reviewing facility. The collaborative content maintenance will reduce the significant cost and effort while keeping the quality of the content in par with current technology being practiced in the industry.