NELS: a system for creating, archiving and serving digital courseware documents

The paper discusses an infrastructure needed to design, develop, and support a new National Educational Learning System (NELS). The NELS system, when established, would be a resource for those institutions with undergraduate curricula that want to evolve their educational program in new ways. It would capitalize on the development and use of newly emerging technologies in higher education. It would provide exemplars of digital documents, furnish tools, and help find national support for those faculty interested in the future of teaching. It would be a unique system that would provide an opportunity to combine pedagogy and technology. It is our belief that NELS would be a critical national resource available to educators focused on the following four specific areas: (1) A National Information Exchange (NIE), which includes authoring studios and delivery environments. (2) Quality assessment. (3) Educational theory and instructional pedagogy, and (4) Distance learning. These areas include elements that demand new roles for instruction, such as an ability to quickly access new information of high textual and visual quality, an ability for faculty and students to access and create information that fosters new teacher-student relationships, techniques that measure the impact of electronically mediated instruction, and studies that promote a sound educational and pedagogical foundation for the application of technology to learning both at local and remote sites