Objective Purpose The overall aim of OSCAR is to develop an open authoring system supporting joint design and production of multimedia training materials. The system will support collaboration and communication between multiple actors involved in joint course development as well as the access and re-use of existing training materials, both on local and wide areas. Increasing needs of uniformity, quality, productivity and reliability of the course development process along with increasing opportunities for large scale training projects are making collaborative and distributed development of training materials one of the most promising sectors of the educational technology market. This is particularly pushed by the current process leading to a single European market, that is deeply affecting training and education policies. Therefore, OSCAR refers to an application scenario featured by the distribution, both over local and wide areas, of the authoring resources such as actors involved, authoring tools, information base and equipment. Some initiatives and frameworks of joint course development are: the EC COMETT and Euroform Programmes, the ESA CBT Programme, the network of the European Open Universities, big European companies involved in large transnational training projects, courseware producers adopting a team approach and/or a distributed development process. Co-authoring services have been developed that are accessible from a computer desktop connected to a local area network or, on a wider area, via the Internet, or ISDN. Authoring services include tools for the design and production of multimedia. Co-ordinating services support the organisation and management of courseware projects. Collaboration services allow group communication and sharing of documents, information and tools by people working together in the same activity. Co-decision services support decision making by a work group about many factors relevant to the courseware development process, and Re-use services facilitate the re-use of existing training materials, allowing retrieval and adaptation.Technical approach The aim of the project is to develop and pilot test a system for supporting collaborative and distributed authoring of multimedia training materials. The emphasis is on the provision of co-authoring services which have been grouped in four classes: Coordination services for supporting organization and management of courseware projects (i.e. courseware project management, quality assurance, work flow control, system configuration). Collaboration services allowing group communication and sharing of documents, half-fabricates, tools by people working together in the same activity (to this end workspaces, grouping objects relevant to specific roles into the work group, will be set up within the OSCAR system). Co-decision services for supporting decision making by a work group about many factors relevant to the courseware development process (such as the choice of the appropriate educational strategy, delivery media, approach to the learner modeling, detail level of the contents). Re-use services facilitating the reusability of existing training materials and/or half-fabricates by means of guided navigation of the materials, conversion mechanisms between formats, design techniques for producing re-usable components. The above Co-authoring services will be built on three infrastructure layers: communication space, common information space and authoring space, which will be set up by mainly harnessing existing products and/or prototypes. The Communication Space, essentially based on the interconnection of Local Area Networks (LAN) by means of Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) and satellite, will support the multimedia information exchange between actors and the access to local and remote databases of existing multimedia training materials. The Common Information Space, based on an object oriented model, will allow input, storage, navigation and retrieval of multimedia information produced during the courseware development process. Here basic mechanisms of data distribution, sharing and versioning will be supplied to support the cooperative work. The Authoring Space, built on the previous two layers, will include a combined set of software tools dedicated to design and produce multimedia courseware. Authoring tools, coming from the market or from other DELTA projects will be incorporated, integrated and tailored to specific application fields. In 1994, the prototypes developed during the project will be assembled in an integrated prototype which will be pilot tested, under realistic conditions, by sponsoring partners (mainly aerospace companies) over networked sites. The pilot test will concern joint courseware design and production, and result in practical guidelines for joint course development at European level. OSCAR System architecture OSCAR will be built on a software platform based on a client/server model, which refers to industry standard systems. Such a platform allows the coexistence of the MS-DOS and UNIX worlds in order to combine the versatility of personal computers with the networking and transaction capabilities of workstations. An Object Oriented Database Management System (OODBMS); will be running on the server to hold all the multimedia objects produced during the courseware development process. The client applications will be running under MS-WINDOWS on PCs connected to the host system by means of an Ethernet LAN. The communication links on wide area will be ensured by ISDN and satellite. The selected OODBMS is available for both a standalone and a networked environment. On the latter configuration, it offers a multi-client/multi-server architecture and features distribution and transaction management for concurrent access to objects among members of a work group. The OODBMS runs on all the major UNIX workstations and on WINDOWS, and it also runs with standard C; and C++; compilers. Output The main expected results of the OSCAR Project are: Models of collaborative and distributed development of courseware which, focusing on communication paths within the work group involved in courseware project, permit the specification of regulations and procedures for the coordination of the individual tasks. Open system architecture referring to de-jure or de-facto standards and able to incorporate external tools. Multimedia communication facilities supporting the distribution of the authoring process and applications such as electronic mail, file transfer tailored to the distributed and collaborative authoring. Data base of training materials and half-fabricates of the courseware development process, acting as a common repository where information shared by various applications are consistently managed, concurrently made available to and updated by different actors. Authoring tools covering the phases of design and production of the courseware life-cycle. Software tools, supplying high level services (co-authoring services) for supporting collaboration, coordination, co-decision and re-use in courseware projects. Methodology and practical guidelines for joint courseware development at European level. Impact The OSCAR Project will bring significant benefits to the European training industry through: improvement in the access and effectiveness of Open Learning Systems in terms of flexibility of authoring systems, remote access to authoring resources, IT&T; supports to the producers of training materials increase of the market competitiveness of the courseware producers, in terms of better economies of scale, improvements in courseware quality and effectiveness In addition, OSCAR is one of the key projects of the current phase of DELTA, which is expected to bring contributions to the Common Training Architecture (CTA) definition. CTA is the DELTA forum through which recommendations will be communicated to the IT and telecommunication industry and its relevant standard bodies. The expected contributions of OSCAR, through a cross-partnership with the CTA project, will be in area of databases of training materials. Here, the OSCAR Project will evaluate and demonstrate recommended standards concerning a common repository of multimedia materials relevant to the authoring and learning processes. The direct involvement of potential users (as sponsoring partners) in the pilot test of OSCAR will serve to evaluate the effectiveness of the prototype and, in general, to measure the success of the project. Fields of science natural sciencescomputer and information sciencessoftwarenatural sciencescomputer and information sciencesdatabasesengineering and technologymechanical engineeringvehicle engineeringaerospace engineeringsatellite technologynatural sciencesphysical sciencesclassical mechanicsfluid mechanicsfluid dynamicssocial scienceseconomics and businesseconomicsproduction economicsproductivity Programme(s) FP3-DELTA 2 - Specific programme of research and technological development (EEC) in the field of telematic systems in areas of general interest - Flexible and distance learning (DELTA) -, 1990-1994 Topic(s) Data not available Call for proposal Data not available Funding Scheme Data not available Coordinator Tecnopolis Csata Novus Ortus EU contribution No data Address Strada Provinciale per Casamassima Km 3.00 70010 Valenzano Bari Italy See on map Total cost No data
