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The first inspiration for the project on which we were later to practice was born in early 1992 when my colleague and I were both teaching German at the European School of Management in Oxford. We found that our students there loved role-playing and the closer the subject was to their own studies the better. The problem was finding suitable plots as well as inventing and supervising the role plays as trained linguists, i.e. non-economists. We found that there was some German teaching material using case studies but it wasn't varied enough and did not include background documentation to prepare students (and their trainers!) for the case. Furthermore, instructions were too fuzzy and students didn't always know what they had to do whilst the trainer didn't know what students might actually already know. Hence we set about designing some such cases ourselves. From the start we wanted to publish our product.
In the meantime we had both changed jobs and particularly I now
had more possibilities to actually research this project. We put
together a list of companies we wanted to visit to then make up
cases with the help of their material and interviews. This all
went very well (1993) and the companies (German and Swiss) were
much more cooperative than we had hoped for. Now we had to work
on the actual case studies (we soon called them modules), transcribing
the interviews, re-recording them (for better sound quality),
writing glossaries and designing tasks and role-plays. Pedagogically
oriented progression has been very important to us. - We had no
intention of simply producing a gimmick!
2. Finding suitable publishers
At first we had a book+cassette product in mind, but a CD-ROM was already considered. We knew that so far CDs were being used in GCSE language teaching on the one hand (from £25 upwards) and in business training (from £1000 upwards) on the other hand. Where might we fit?
We formulated the target audience as follows:
Students with A-level German or a comparable skills level who study Economics, and people who have some business experience and are learning German to do business in German speaking countries (e.g. also learners from Eastern European countries).
For the next two years we kept writing to publishers (around 10) which we had "garnered" from the Writers' and Artists' Yearbook; we approached several German but mainly British publishers, sending them a covering letter and a page long description of the project including an analysis of the intended audience, features, progress and novelty factor. Luckily and maybe surprisingly, we did not seem to land on anybody's "slush pile" The quickest and most encouraging replies came from Germany. There they were clearly interested in the idea but it must be said that in the end nothing came of it. We can now see that e.g. we would have presented internal competition to some new Klett products which must then have been near its final stage. Other publishers had no experience with the technology or couldn't see the market, e.g. because Eastern European countries were/have been? not paying in hard cash but in kind.
The British publishers could be classified into three groups. a) Those who wrote openly that they did not have enough time to give the project careful consideration; b) those who said, "yes but:" and c) those who said no straight away. The "yes but" category was mainly worried that post A-level material made the market too small. If they had any experience with CDs, it was at beginners' and intermediate level and they clearly wanted to go on tapping that market. They also seemed to outsource the development and production of CDs (e.g Hodder and Stoughton with their Hotel Europa) and couldn't necessarily envisage what we had in mind. We were determined, however, that our material was valid as it was and would not lend itself to being adapted to near beginners. After all, it hadn't been our intention to produce anything for a beginners' audience as there is really plenty of material and we doubt anyway that intricate business situations suit this linguistic level.
When we became more confident that a CD-Rom would be far better than (yet another!) book, we also approached software houses. The unfortunate experience there can be that you cannot expect any support in pedagogical questions even though the technical side of the products they already have may be brilliant and fascinating.
To sum up the difficulty of publishing in electronic format it can be described as a cross-cultural initiative in many respects:
1) There were software houses as well as the well-established but technologically still rather inexperienced traditional publishing houses.
2) The know-how on how to produce the material for such a CD-Rom was not (unlike with a book) in clearly defined hands, or should I say heads: We, the authors, knew what we wanted to achieve in teaching terms, the software houses could have helped us to transfer that into the realm of technology and the traditional publishers knew the market. But all three work as relatively separate entities and the problem for us was to find a publisher who would take the risk of producing something in a new medium for a not so well established market.
We first of all struck lucky by finding someone who would do the computing side for us. Mike Beilby had been the Director of the CCBL here and is now semi-retired; he is paid by the university for helping projects such as ours on the technical side and he has been invaluable, inventing the design, macro-structure and helping with the pedagogical side as well. From his own field, mathematics, he has plenty of experience in designing programmes for student learning. At the same time he has a keen eye for the more artistic side of the design. The only problem is that he doesn't speak German!
We then used the occasion of the ALL annual conference in Spring
1995 to write to some more publishers in advance, inviting them
to attend our talk on and demonstration of our project. By then
we had parts of two modules to show on the computer. This proved
to be the breakthrough and we had a number of interested publishers
including one who had clearly dismissed our project before! The
publisher with whom we are now working has been encouraging and
appreciative all the way. Since we found him our work has progressed
more swiftly. We really feel quite rewarded for all the hard work
we had done to get to that point.
3. A moving market
It was thus clear that the market and publisher's outlook on new technology had changed (even though their technical expertise might not have increased a lot):
Needless to say, we were very happy when we finally had a publisher who wanted to offer us a contract as he was convinced we were on the right track. Since he saw the first samples, work has progressed both in terms of volume (all modules are finished or nearly finished now) and in terms of design.
Anybody who has written and published a book will have experienced the dilemma of wanting to finish it whilst, at the same time, perfecting his/her work and adding new and interesting aspects. This can lead to great delays and frustration on all sides. With multimedia publishing this problem is magnified because it isn't just the contents which the writers keep on reviewing and improving (hopefully) but the design as well. In the 18 months since we found a publisher we have
What pleases the eye (and the learner, we hope) can take not just hours but working weeks and the balance between bringing an up to the minute product onto the market and getting a product ready at all is very difficult to strike.
The dilemma is made worse through the changed competency and role allocations which we have already mentioned: Much of the success of our original work depends on how it is transfered onto and developed within the new medium, hence the computer man, Mike, is essential for us. Whilst we as authors have learned a lot about what the new technology can do (and it can now do things it couldn't do 12 months ago), this only enables us to prepare our materials better for Mike's "digestion". On the other hand, authors are not usually able to ask their publisher about his expertise in whatever they are doing but start discovering this as times goes by. We think we found that the person who should be in final control of the product (and the trial version) was not able to keep up with the progress of technology. This, we believe, explains some of the delays we have encountered. As we are writing this article we hear from the publisher himself that a media developer has now been employed. This really confirms our assumptions. The technology market is, it seems to us, much more fleeting than the traditional publishing market and what was sufficient to carry out business decisions today might not be enough tomorrow, hence somebody is needed in a publishing house who is responsible just for that area.
The unfamiliarity of publishers with the electronic medium also
came to light when we received the draft contract. It was really
for a book (e.g. detailing proof-reading stage and completed copy
ready for printing). Even the Society of Author's contract vetting
team admitted they could only give us pointers for improving the
contract. There are no standard contracts around yet.
5. The future - Any lessons?
What the future looks like for such ventures is something I would like to discuss with the participants as they have presumably come to this round table to exchange ideas. How can our and your experience be used profitably to bring good products with reasonable speed onto the market? How can the communication between technical, authoring and publishing side be improved. We are proud to be with a publisher who is now taking steps to overcome some of the cross-cultural issues, but in houses which are not so pro-active, how can a fertile educational process be engendered?