Alexander from Androgogic is talking about building a content management system into an educational technology architecture. Here’s the notes I was able to capture.

Business drivers …
– 79,000+ distance students
– the introduction of new higher education initiatives.
– distributed content creation.
– content is reused across many different courses.
– increased demand for full online support.

The existing system:
– Student management system for finance and logistics.
– low-end generic CMS driven corporate websites.
– no online learning
– all materials published via print
– rudimentary content reuse
– … many educational institutions are at this level.

When you log into the system now, you get:
– a personalized home page of all of your content areas and “collections”
– RSS feeds that the student wants to see
– errata on the associated text books that they are using
– for some people (eg, tutors), the ability to add new content from the underlying repository.

More about the CMS
What makes content “smart”?
– we have published the material into a learning management system … which is just a store
– we have add new things … search, collections, metadata, workflow, version control, and digital rights management

They have also used the workflow capabilities to running the business, eg, getting an accreditation for a new degree at state or federal level in Australia.

Management of “state” for documents is complex … because there are up to 8 different state points. Eg, draft, moderated, etc.

Benefits:
– 30% saved costs on content management from old ways to the new automated way.

Alexander used both Moodle and Equella in his demonstration.

Summary
– Content production and publication should be closely integrated.
– Content refreshment is almost as expensive as content creation and should be carefully management
– Courseware is but one knowledge type that can and should be managed
– learning content management system is critical in any educational technology architecture