Producing Web Course Material with IBM Knowledge Factory Team

The Department of CS at University of Helsinki has now for 1.5 years participated in IBM sponsored TUeLIP (Top University e-Learning International Program) project. TUeLIP is a collaborative project of six European Universities (their CS departments) and IBM. Its goal is to produce Web based e-learning material and courses to be used by the participants. As most participants had scant knowledge of e-learning in general, the project has been a very good kick-off to introduce e-learning aspects in general to the CS departments involved. The expectations on the kind of e-learning to be used varied from self-study courses to cooperative learning, and from interactive Web courses to online instruction sessions. However, the project is not restricted to any specific course type but encourages the participants to try out new techniques and styles in their courses. The participants were given a free ride in the form of IBM sponsoring the development of one prototype e-learning course. Introduction to Databases was selected as the prototype and its development was distributed among four universities. This gave us and all the responsible universities a good view on IBM’s way in producing e-learning courses. In general, the approach is very professional and thorough, although, it may not be suitable for our courses at large. It is like a well-defined software engineering process as compared to common arts like way of course production. However, understanding this process well gives us valuable insight on how we should proceed with our own material production. IBM Knowledge Factory (KF) is the content production part of IBM’s greater Mindspan Solutions (IBM, 2002a) scheme, that is geared at companies easing themselves into e-learning. The KF team produces, with clients’ help, the final product. Knowledge Producer (KP) is an IBM internal software tool that is used by KF team to actually put together the product. Using the course material is a separate issue to producing it, and in general the e-learning courses could be run on any platform (e.g., WebCT). However, KP is especially geared to produce material well suited for Lotus Learning Space (LLS) (IBM, 2002b). The prototype course was implemented on LLS environment. We now introduce the Knowledge Factory process with more details. We also briefly describe our experiences with the development process, the material produced and the use of this material. Finally, we summarize our experiences and give some ideas of the future.