Paper on 'Educational and Institutional Fexibility of Australian Educational Software' published by Campus Wide Information Systems

"Bend me, shape me, anyway you want me,

long as you love me, its all right" - Amen Corner

Campus Wide Information Systems have just published 'Educational and Institutional Flexibility of Australian Educational Software', a viewpoint paper which I wrote with Barry O'Grady and Peter Mayall of Curtin Business School. The heart of the paper is the identification of these categories:

"Well-designed educational software can be a key enabler for flexible education, although embedding it at an institutional level brings its own demands for change management. Here
we define flexible educational software to mean applications that provide both educational and institutional flexibility. Educationally flexible software should enable educators to design and manage effective learning experiences and materials and provide an interface that is appropriate for educating. Meanwhile it should provide students with opportunities to learn at their convenience and provide an interface dedicated to learning. Institutionally flexible software should provide institutions and their developers with facilities to adapt and integrate the product with local administrative processes, IT platforms and teaching culture. It should also help universities to join effective federations and partnerships with other institutions, which requires adherence to open standards and tolerance of diverse coding languages and platforms, including those that are popular in other nations ... The three [Australian] educational software packages we introduce below each match our informal definitions of educationally and institutionally flexible educational software and provide solid support and training to domestic and international clients." (Shurville, O'Grady and Mayall, 2008, p 76-77).

The paper is part of a special issue on Australasian E-Learning which I co-edited with Professor Ken Fernstrom (University College of the Fraser Valley, British Columbia), Dr Michael Henderson (Monash) and Barry O’Grady (Curtin). The papers were sourced from ICICTE 2007.

Reference

• Shurville, S., O'Grady, B. and Mayall, P. (2008) 'Educational and Institutional Flexibility of Australian Educational Software', Campus-Wide Information Systems, Vol. 25 No. 2, pp 74-84.