Abstract:

Nobody knows about the money spend for creating, production and distribution of learning content in higher education in Germany. In any other industry, a result like this would generate a quick response aimed at restoring the bottom line. For the last years, however, everybody has looked only the other way, letting the budget absorb the cost of these production processes. In these less certain economic times, they are now calling to account for underperforming technology. Many of the challenges currently facing lectures are symptoms of problems with learning content creation, development and presentation. Learning Factory solves these problems by integrating critical innovations that have been proven over the last ten to twenty years in different industrial areas, but have not yet been brought or ported together in higher education. We explain that a Learning Factory Framework is a configuration of processes, templates, patterns, and tools that can be used to rapidly and cost-effectively produce an open-ended set of unique variants of a “standard product” (learning content). The new methodology promises to industrialize content creation, first by supporting the creation and development process of content, automating the assembly of the content, and then by connecting these processes across organizational boundaries to form supply chains that organizes distributed teams together.

First, we explored the technology and tools, which are used to produce material for our teaching process today. To support this study, we introduce a student worker, and watched him in the process of learning content creation. We then described the architecture of the tools, processes, etc. in just enough detail to expose some of the challenges that the worker encounters using the technologies. At the end, we started to re-define the process of learning content creation with standardized, current methods, tools and best practices learned from the evaluation. We found key elements, which are very important for our process: slides, presentations, hand out (called script), e-learning content and so on. The most central application is Microsoft PowerPoint for producing slides, and giving presentations. Therefore, the decision to standardize this application for content creation is a vital part. High production value, rich media content can seldom be produced outside of a team environment – this is the preserve of the professionalized organization. The same team environment produced the best learning materials using traditional media. To enlarge productivity in the team for the digital world, we must support the team with the best tools based on the environment given as a platform for content creation. Only a minority of enthusiasts can operate in the production process as solo practitioners without process tools to support their work.