• Background
• CLASS Project
• CLASS Staff
• General Insights
• Questions & Considerations
• Content
• Development Teams
• Content Acquisition
• Assessment & Grading
• Design
• Introduction
• Modeling
• Presentation
• Interactivity
• Navigation
• Assessments
• National Standards
• Quality Assurance
• Courses
• Features
• Courses
• Copyrights
• Technology
• Building a Course
• See and Say
• There are Limits!
• Influence and Change
• CLASS Courses
• Content
• Extras Designed
• Extras Linked
• Class Assessments
• A Bit of Dreamweaver
• Proofing
• Graphics
• MOUs
• Detailing Treatment
• Course Credits
• CLASS Style
• Publications

CLASS™ Concept

The CLASS™ concept and mission was to establish an environment where designers of instruction could create courseware built with objects of content which could be used independently or in concert with a variety of other objects to deliver instruction.

The development of the courses for the CLASS™ Project first required recognition of several factors. Paramount among these was the World Wide Web offered a new and different method of delivery. Therefore, the print-based courses could not be taken and simply transferred to the Web. Secondly, in order to fully utilize the potential of the Web as an educational delivery system, there would need to be new software and technologies developed. Thirdly, and premised on the first two points, production of the courses would take place in a manner different than traditional multi-media production. The Project required invention in both the instructional design and in the technology. It was to offer new avenues of educational access through cost-effective alternatives to conventional classroom teaching environments.

CLASS™ was a dynamically interactive, student-centered learning environment delivered electronically via the World Wide Web. Students acquired content through moving imagery, graphics, sound, and text within a seamless navigational system that encouraged individualized learning, discovery and exploration. They were provided an electronic ‘notebook’ to help them store and sort everything from video to text.

CLASS™ provided the technology needed to support all of the media. It provided students with choices in their own learning paths and required students to interact with materials in an ever-widening understanding of the concepts being presented. The idea was to allow students to determine their own mastery of the material through electronically graded practice exams. The pedagogy allowed learners to gain access to digital libraries from national, historic, scientific, and research centers over the global and national information infrastructure. It encouraged interaction between learners and instructors, and learner and learners while stressing the development of life and workplace skills, citizenship responsibilities, and critical thinking.

While CLASS™ was trying to find a stable development environment the military was perfecting their perspective on standards for technology based education. The University of Nebraska was a late participant in helping to establish some of the standards. Five points of reference or ‘standards’ were part of the original technology plan for CLASS™ - the military labeled them: reuseability, maintainability, interoperability, durability and accessability.

An early concept in the CLASS™ Project was to use an object-oriented relational database architecture for course development. In this world – you create and object (picture, graphic, video, paragraph, etc.) label it to include tags which describe what “it” is, and then file it in a repository for future use in another course. This is similar to a library of original works with keyword search capabilities. Appropriate database design is critical – not only in course development and maintenance – but also for research. Research is impossible if you can’t get to the data generated by a poorly designed course architecture. (reuseability)

When an object requires maintenance or updating, it gets such in the original form which is used from several location in any number of courses. You maintain the database which drives the content for the courseware – rather than the original programmer maintaining each and every piece of every course. (maintainability)

A strategy is needed for using learning and information technology in education and training – high school, military, college, corporate. This would allow use of instructional components developed in one location with one set of tools or platform to be used in another location with a different set of tools or platform rather than back to the original programmer for changes. (interoperability)

A stable development environment is critical. Courseware – without redesign or recoding – needs to operate even when the base technology changes. You can not control the Internet, the browser companies, or the computer manufacturers, but you can take particular steps to minimize the effects their changes have on the products in the market. (durability)

The consolidation of development and support for instructional technology would enhance the quality of service to customers – inside and outside of the University. One location – one repository for information. It would help to insure a consistent and reliable experience for students. It would also reduce the cost of development and maintenance for courses. There are many content resources which could be used and reused with very little associated cost – if you could get to them and trust that they are without defect. (accessability)

Software development is a concept that the ‘product’ is without problems or errors – ‘clean’ enough to be packaged and put on the shelf for sale. This requires a stable architecture. The CLASS™ concept was to produce market-ready coursed to be stored on a server of a service provider and maintained from a distance.

Star Schools funding for CLASS™ ran out before this was accomplished with the home-grown architecture. Class.com has since taken the courses BlackBoard™ which is based in Washington D.C. Founded with a vision to transform the Internet into a powerful environment for the education experience, BlackBoard™ traces its roots to its original teaching and learning software platform, CourseInfo. In 1997, two education consultants formed Blackboard LLC and were contracted to help lead the formation of the Educause IMS standards group for online education technology. At the same time, a student-faculty team at Cornell University was developing a software product that would power online education and be scalable for wider institutional application. Recognizing the high demand for a sophisticated, easy-to-use, and affordable online education software platform, the two groups merged to form Blackboard Inc.

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