Motivating Authors to Share and Re-Use Pedagogical Documents

摘要

Computer based training (CBT) and Computer Aided Learning (CAL) applications have been around for more than thirty years. Conceived as rigid integrated stand-alone pieces of software, they never turned out a real success although they costed a huge amount of human and financial efforts. Thanks to the dazzling deployment of information and communication technologies (ICT) coupled with the tenfold increase of computer power, new and promising opportunities for open and distance education opened up. New paradigms were born, amongst which those of learning citizen and share-and-reuse are worth mentioning. If properly taken into consideration, these concepts influence greatly the way on-line teaching and training could be handled, in turn modifying the way the production of electronic documents for education and training should be dealt with. In this paper, because we firmly believe it to be one of the main issues, we will concentrate on the share-and-reuse paradigm. Lots of efforts (ARIADNE, Dublin Core, IMS, eBioMED.ch, IEEE-LTSC, CEN-CENELEC, Medline Mesh tree, etc.) have been invested in defining a proper indexation schema, resulting in an appropriate descriptor or header, for describing pedagogical documents. The difficulty stems from the following paradox: the header should be as detailed as possible to get, when querying the knowledge pool, an adequate set of documents, and as light as possible to make sure that indexation will be performed. So whatever the international standard might be, it will achieve its aim of fostering share-and-reuse only if the majority of the involved persons accept to use it! The question therefore is: "How to convince an author to index a document?" In order to try and answer this question, we are investigating what are the key factors of motivation for an author. The work in progress, detailed hereafter, intends to detect (ⅰ) what could motivate or impede authors from sharing and/or re-using educational documents, and (ⅱ) what could be proposed to increase their willingness to do" so. A representative panel of authors, belonging to the academic world, will be determined that will answer a survey for discovering what are these key factors. At this stage we exclude the professional world assuming that the objectives and underlying motivations for share and reuse are quite different from those of the academic world (Confidentiality considerations, Strategic information, Institutional policies...).