Graphic: adopted from the "Fraunhofer for Industrial Engineering - IAO" document "Knowledge-Integrative and Coordinative Service Activities - Success Factors for a Sustained Competitive Advantage, Theses and Issues of a New Research Initiative": http://www.pm.iao.fhg.de/wissensarbeit/engl/wik_engl.pdf
Instructional design, course production and publishing will become key activities in the networked universities
Autor: Leopold Reif, Hoffmann & Reif
It seems obvious that the new nationwide learning network in Ethiopia will change dramatically the way universities provide and distribute their services. Because the networks require the materialisation of knowledge into media and the production of eLearning programmes, course production and publishing will need to become a core activity of faculties.
Subject matter experts, such as professors - enabled by training on instructional design and by the provision of Open Source publishing applications - will need to become involved in the production and distribution of content.
For the educational institutions this scenario would have far reaching consequences with regards to qualification requirements, workflows and the workplace itself.
Are traditional universities within their current organisational structures ready to productise their academic programmes? Usually not, because content is owned by each professor individually and is thus regarded as a personal intellectual property. It is elaborated individually in the study, distributed orally in lectures, scribbled at a blackboard and published as a paper.
When knowledge is produced cooperatively in an academic environment, it is done so in a self organised way, rather than in a formal coordinated fashion. The relationship between the two approaches in universities -; self-organisation and coordination - is usually about 65% self organisation to 35% coordination, as can be seen in the graphic below.
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Knowledge intensive services allow for rather flexible forms of coordination and cooperation. Schedules are not tight, processes are not standardized and it's the individual performance that counts. The graphic that is shown above gives an overview on the variety of cooperation modes that range from the self-organized and informal to highly formalised working styles - from card players to industrial production. Course production is shown as rather formally organised at this scale, whereas a university allows much more room for self organization.
As one can see at this graphic the development of content as a product within an academic institution will require a publishing approach which is rather different from the traditional content elaboration and representation in universities. This is a challenge because different work cultures are expected to become blended.
It will need an appropriate organisational infrastructure that supports the stakeholders to establish a "work culture mosaic" - meaning: the integration of a set of different working styles - that allows efficient course production and course distribution.