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Valuable, Viable Software in Education: Case
Studies and Analysis analyzed examples of software that have proven not only valuable (as evidenced by evaluation, awards won) but also viable (long-lived and widely used). The study was carried out through Educom's Educational Uses of Information Technology Program (EUIT). The book was edited by Paul Morris of Tufts University, Steve Ehrmann (The Annenberg/CPB Project), Randi Goldsmith (John Wiley and Sons), Kevin Howat (Macromedia), and Vijay Kumar (Mount Holyoke College).
What follows is the Table of Contents
and Introduction.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Valuable Viable Software in Education: Case Studies and Analysis
Introduction
Valuable Viable Software in Education - Case Studies
LearnIt
Lotus 1-2-3
MathCAD
Mathematica
MicroCalc
Minitab
Prewrite
PsychSimII
Ramas Library of Ecological Software
Slice of Life
A la recontre de Philippe
Super Scoop
Alchemy III
Basic Biology Series
Calculus & Mathematica
The Children's Writing & Publishing Center
GeneWright
Good Graphs!
Graphical Analysis III
IDRISI
Valuable Viable Software in Education - Analysis
Analytical Framework
Worldware
Curricular Software That Fills a Niche
Course-Length Bodies of Software
Big Grant Software
Adaptable Software
Corporate Driven Software
Summary and Conclusions
Valuable Viable Software in Education - Appendix
Appendix I: Guidelines for Writing a VVS Case Study
Appendix II: Learning More About VVS
Appendix III: Case Profiles
INTRODUCTION
A FIELD WITH POOR MEMORY
Educational software is a field with no memory. You might think that we
would look
for the kinds of software that have proven most likely to succeed (and
for the kinds most likely to fail) so that we could produce more of the
first type and less of the second. Yet somehow every new advance seems to
promise that we can ignore yesterday's frustrations because just around
the corner is a gloriously beckoning tomorrow. Trying to remember, and
analyze, yesterday seems irrelevant.
Thus investors and by that term we mean all those who put their hope,
sweat, time, and sometimes money into the development of software and its adoption into the curriculum ignore what happened to yesterday's software. In fact there has been virtually no research about the educational life cycle of software packages.
The price of ignorance, however, has been years of waste, as investors,
faculty, support staff, publishers, software houses, hardware vendors,
government agencies, and foundations attempt to develop and distribute
types of software that promise to be revolutionary but rarely attain
wide, persistent, and beneficial use. Current and potential investors who
ignore history usually substitute for the facts one of the two following
generalizations:
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"Our practices for developing and using software for learning are as
good as they can be. Therefore I am safe in investing in the newest, most
mind-blowing software."
-
"There probably has never been a software package that is both
educationally valuable (i.e., has great educational value if used) and
also viable (i.e., was used enough to reward an investor like me).
Therefore I'm not going to invest!"
It is true that failures have been disconcertingly common, especially in
higher education: failures when software was begun but not completed, when software was meant for wide use but was used only by its developers, and when software achieved more use but only for a disappointingly brief time.
THE STUDY
Many members of our group had experienced such frustrations. Once we
decided to
examine the roots of success and failure, our first design decision was
to focus on success
Past success, being so rare, might be more informative and also more
likely to attract
attention from people in our field, a field noted for its rose colored
glasses. Our questions
therefore were:
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Are some types of software more likely to be successful than other
types?
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Do successful pieces of software have life cycles that are in any
way predictable?
-
Are there archetypal problems and opportunities that are
different for different types of software?
-
By studying stories of success, can investors help to create more
such successes in the future?
We then turned to questions of definition. What sort of success were we
looking for? After much debate, we arrived at the following definitions for the purpose of focusing our inquiry:
Value: Software is valuable if it has the capability of being used
to help improve teaching and learning. As the cases show, indicators of
value can include evaluation results, awards won, testimonials from
users, and the like. Notice that our definition of software's "value" is
independent of the extent to which it is used.
Viability: Software is viable if it is used by enough people for a
long enough period of time that all its investors (original developers, funders, publishers, institutional support staff, faculty, and students) can justly feel that they each have received an adequate return on their own investments in developing, acquiring, and/or learning to use the software. Rather than leaving anyone feeling burned out, cheated, or in any other sense a loser, viable software leaves the various players receptive to the next
generation of software.
Success: We have assumed, and our cases seem to confirm, that
software that is both valuable and viable can be considered successful. Its value, namely, its potential for educational benefit, has in fact been realized.
Having arrived at these definitions, we decided to devote our inquiry to
learning whether there are particular types or families of valuable software that are more likely to be viable. And if there are such families, do they
encounter common problems or opportunities?
By studying the life cycle and attributes of each type of valuable viable
software, we hope to attract future investors to that type of software and, more important, to alert them to characteristic pitfalls and opportunities so
that their chances for successful investment, and the software's chances
for success, can be improved.
Because our literature search failed to uncover prior studies of valuable
viable software, it was not possible to begin with a mass survey of the
fate of large numbers of software programs. We lacked the categories and
hypotheses needed to organize such a study. Instead, we have used case
studies and, because we had no funds to hire professional researchers and
instead had to rely on volunteer effort, those case studies were created
by members of our group who typically were either users or developers of
the software under study. We have attempted to retain a certain amount of
objectivity; nonetheless, as usual in this business, caveat emptor!
This decision to use case studies, forced by circumstance, led to one
discovery that may be of major benefit to you, the reader. Our group was
composed of virtually every type of investor in software: developers,
funders, publishers, hardware vendors, college and university support
staff, and end users. In order to ensure objectivity and thoroughness, we
joined in reading and analyzing each case study, much as a business
school seminar might debate a case study. And as others have discovered
before us, this debate was far more revealing than the case study alone,
because the members of our "seminar" brought a substantial amount of
knowledge to the table, knowledge whose sharing was triggered by
analyzing the case together. Thus, Appendix II will offer you some advice
about how to maximize the usefulness of the data and how to learn even
more about software and education by organizing your own seminar or
workshop on valuable and viable software.
INITIAL FINDINGS THAT HELPED US SELECT CASES
We reached one tentative conclusion almost as soon as we began to pool
our knowledge (as the list of authors indicates, our collective knowledge of software is considerable because our team included developers, funders, computing support staff, hardware vendors, and publishers):
Finding 1: If computer software is not adequately upgraded to cope
with changes in operating systems, it probably will not last long enough to achieve viability. Most cases of valuable viable software of which we are aware have life cycles of as much as a decade, during which they had been
upgraded several times.
Since the economics of upgrading (where do the resources come from to
upgrade software that is no longer new?) are critical to viability, we had to
reach back into the past so that most of our cases would be old enough to
highlight that issue. A few more recent pieces of software were selected
for balance and to see whether issues had changed. However, we decided to
study mainly software that had been in use for at least two years by
people other than the original developer.
Our early discussions then led us to consider three basic places to look
for valuable viable software:
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Worldware: A term coined to denote software that has a substantial
market beyond instruction.
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Curricular software: Software that is developed and used exclusively
for instruction, with the aim of wide distribution. Some curricular software
is highly flexible and can be used for many purposes, whereas other
curricular software is focused on very specific teaching or learning tasks.
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Home brew: Software that is developed with the aim of use only by
its developer(s).
Finding 2: It was immediately apparent that most of the valuable
viable software, of which we were aware, fell into the category of worldware: word processors, spreadsheets, statistical and other mathematical software, software for managing library services, telecommunications software, tools for design and composition in fields as diverse as architecture and music, tools for modeling and simulation, research databases online and on discs, programming languages, and software that increases access for disabled people. The sheer size of the list hints at how pervasive, subtle, and profound the influence of computer software in education has become.
Paradoxically, when most people think of valuable viable software, they
think not of worldware but of curricular software. Curricular software success stories are much harder to find. We therefore decided to draw most of our cases from this area. We do not want to reinforce the illusion that this is where valuable viable software has been most often found. Quite the
opposite: curricular software is the area where investors (funders,
developers, publishers, support staff, and end users) are most at
risk.
Our next study design decision involved home brew. Home brew is an
important category of valuable viable software, including everything from
word-processed syllabi and lecture "overheads" developed with
presentation software, to more ambitious software for one's students,
developed with HyperCard and other authoring packages. However, we
decided that we could not afford to study home brew while also studying
worldware and curricular software; its issues were simply too different
from those of the other two categories.
We then made several other decisions that helped frame the universe of
cases for study:
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We would include at least a few cases from the K-12 world despite
the fact that it is not our primary area of expertise. We sensed that
market size was a major factor in the shaping of market dynamics for
curricular software. This was a much larger group than the 20 programs we
were able to turn into cases for this study. Of our 20 cases, 7 are
worldware.
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We would exclude telecourses. This decision was pragmatic--we had
tiffle for only one case in this area, a telecourse that had in fact
earned back its $750,000 investment and has been in use for almost a
decade. It was certainly tempting to study curricular software of this
educational scope; it is curricular software with a huge installed base
of hardware that has no problems with changing "operating systems." But
one case seemed insufficient to delineate the issues for this type of
curricular software, and so it has not been included in this volume.
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As a volunteer group whose members did these studies on their own
time and for love of inquiry, we were limited to cases that our members
wished to carry out. This frustrating constraint meant that this volume
could not include many obviously important types of cases. We would love,
for example, to have included examples of curricular software developed
in the 1960s and 1970s, and to have had more videodisc-based curricular
software.
When we asked a group of faculty at an EDUCOM seminar to describe their
vision of typical valuable viable software, their consensus image went something like this: software that is designed by a faculty-led team, costing
several hundred thousand dollars to develop and sold at cost through a
consortium. We hope this book will be valuable for faculty and other
investors of money and sweat equity, if only because we were unable to
find any valuable viable software that resembled that stereotype. Actual
success stories look rather different, as we shall see.
We developed and later fine-tuned a protocol for leading discussions
about the cases. The final version of this protocol is shown in Appendix
II of Valuable, Viable Software in Education, and you may well find it
useful if you wish to conduct a seminar based on the book.
Valuable Viable Software in Education: Cases and Analysis
(ISBN 0-007-198234-5)
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