This blog is by the educational technologist Andrew Brasher. I’d say I’m more ‘technologist’ than ‘educational’, but wouldn’t argue (much) against any one who disputes either description.
Most (all?) of the postings are for my benefit, to help me remember ideas, things I’ve done etc., but if you do stumble across it and find something useful or interesting I’d be happy to hear from you.
Hi Andrew,
The purpose of this email is to find out how active the work is on Compendium and CompendiumLD.
It seems like all major work stopped in 2007 including your work on this website and program revisions. I see that even the links to help and tutorials within the program no longer work and no one seems to be updating them.
So, I am wondering if work on Compendium is winding down and further development will not be done.
I am a retired industry trainer, training manager, quality engineer, and business process engineer.
The past few years I have been searching the Web for state of the art research on ISD methods and tools for doing curriculum design.
Eventually, I want to create a small business teaching technical trainers ISD and use of free open source tools to do it. So far Compendium looks like the most promising tool to me for ISD. However, I think it misses the mark for doing cognitive task analysis and knowledge modeling, both of which I think are necessary to do quality ISD.
MOTPlus architected by Gilbert Paquette looked real promising, for implementing the above mentioned, but that product is not free. So, I’m thinking I could implement these functions CompendiumLD by creating stencils and templates.
I would like to do this, but am reluctant to do so if development on Compendium and LD is going to stop. So, I’d appreciate it if you’d give me a little inside info on the future of Compendium and CompendiumLD.
Thank you for any insights you can give me on the future of Compendium, and thanks for the great work you have contributed to this outstanding piece of software.
Dave Thompson
Ooops! I see I misspoke, you have made entries on this website up until March 2009.
Hi Dave
Just to confirm – development of both Compendium and CompendiumLD is still active, and new versions of CompendiumLD are available from the site http://compendiumld.open.ac.uk. The most recent new version was made available in December 2009, and I’ll be releasing another iteration (mainly bug fixes) later this week, along with some updates to the web site itself.
There is also going to be a new version of Compendium itself released soon – the lead developer ((Michelle Bachler) has a beta version being tested by a closed group but I understand it’s not far off public release though I couldn’t say exactly when that will happen.
Currently develpment of CompendiiumLD is funded until the end of 2010 at least, though it is an open source project so any one can take pick it up and develop it further. The Open University has invested in the mian version, CompendiumLD, and also a ‘lite’ version of the tool has been created for student use in a design course http://www3.open.ac.uk/study/undergraduate/course/u101.htm and a language course that both began in February this year.
I hoipe this gives you enough confidence to go ahead and create some stencils and templates. Please do let me know, and if you go ahead please do share them in some form or another (I can point you to sites to do so if you are interested in doing this).
Thanks for your comments about the software, I must acknowledge the developer of the main branch Michelle Bachler.
Best wishes
Andrew
Andrew,
Thanks for your quick response and information…I appreciate it. I’m still thinking and planning, but when I get further along, I will get back to you on whether I plan to do some stencils and templates.
Thanks again,
Dave