Berlin reflection - social authoring will make LCMS work

"Getting an LCMS to work will require some 1 Mio $ of staffing", says the Director of the Monterey Institute of Technology and Education running NORC. Her presentation was highly convincing and how their organisation works is like this:

No office but a distributed team of eight to nine people - designers, ecducational technologist, media specialists - working from where ever they live. Hence, small overhead. About 4, 5 people are working full time, the rest works 20-50% for NORC. Sometimes work is farmed out, too. Objects/courses are built by community members (usually from universities). The trick to make the object repository/LCMS work is what NORC calls "social authoring".

"The NROC Network supports the collaborative development of online content with a "social authoring" [...]. The NROC editorial, design, and engineering teams works with author groups of Network members to plan syllabi, tables of content, and the presentation approach. The author teams produce content manuscripts, while the NROC teams manage the media and technical development. NROC Development Guidelines provide the framework for effective implementation of navigation, instructional design, media presentation, interactivity, assessment, and accessibility." *

* Sounds familiar? Sounds like D&D? Guess it does...

Often NORC asks people directly to contribute to the object repository because theirs work is know for its quality. "We also turn down offers from contributors. Actually, that happens quite often," I was told.

"So why would anyone come and work with you - since you don't pay?"

"They come because they know that we will help them improve their products and they will walk away with s.th. that is much better than what it was before..."