The importance of quality in engineering courseware development

What do we mean by quality engineering courseware? Why is quality important? Fundamentally, the development of courseware is affected and gathers its unique attributes from a multifaceted group of disciplines each with a different meaning for quality and how the development process influences it. The user community made up of potential courseware adopters-students and faculty are in many ways the external arbiters of quality who are most tactically affected in terms of fulfilling their learning mission; courseware is viewed as a tool, an environment or some other means of achieving a learning goal. Among the constituencies which have become pivotal in the commercial success of multimedia courseware are external arbiters of quality who view the courseware as a product that is governed by the laws of marketing and supply and demand. These include: potential publishers, distributors, and value-added resellers. The finding community made up of public and private foundations has a vested interest in funding quality development efforts and in encouraging or somehow promoting the elevation of some aggregate measure of quality over the entire spectrum; quality here is an input content and process criterion. The validation community made up of employers, and accrediting agencies has a vested interest in ensuring that the quality attributes of curricular materials are as carefully scrutinized as other curricular materials in terms of ensuring that the students are receiving an acceptable level of content and in an appropriate delivery manner; quality in this context is an output content and process criterion. The idea of this forum is to engage representatives from each of these constituencies: users-students and faculty publishers and distributors funding agencies and foundations employers and accrediting agencies to examine quality issues in the development of courseware. We hope to achieve some consensus on the unique but mutually agreeable attributes that must be present in quality courseware.