When a new content-creation solution gets rolled out in online course systems, I've seen a tendency at many higher-education institutions to try to turn the tool into the solution for every problem or perceived problem in online courses. Take, for instance: Macromedia (now Adobe) Breeze. It's an awesome product, and we use both Breeze Presentation and Meeting in our online classes.
Since we've rolled out the tool, however, some people see it as the solution to all of our content delivery issues. Some examples:
"Can't we add some videos to the Breeze presentations?" Well, sure, but is that the right environment for delivering 6 minute videos when Breeze only does progressive download of videos? "But it sure would be nice for the students to watch videos inside the lecture presentations. See what you can do."
"How about if we move our exams out of our testing system and in to Breeze presentations? They can do basic testing, right?" Well, yes, they can, but is that really the right environment to deliver exams? You'll have to give up things like randomization, pulling from a question bank and a bunch of other things that our testing system can do. "Oh, well, it sure would be nice for the students if they could take their quizzes right after they watch the lecture all in the same place."
"Can we put the lab exercises in to Breeze? Breeze makes everything look so nice and it looks more like how it looks in Word than HTML does." Well, I suppose you could, but is converting 7 printed pages worth of text, tables, and images directly into PowerPoint and then Breeze really the best thing for learner comprehension? "Well, the students are very used to Breeze, so it would be nice to have things presented in a familiar way."
I'm not knocking Breeze, really. I've seen this happen with tools we've built (assessment/testing systems, simulation builders, file storage and organization tools, etc.) as well as with other tools pushed out across the educational enterprise.
It's great that some faculty and staff will push a tool to its limits and try to get it to do things it was never really designed to do. But there's a big difference between what you can do and what you should do.
Make sure that the tool is right for the job. There's a saying in software development that goes "If your only tool is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail." Now, some people could level that accusation against me, and they wouldn't be totally off-base, because I use ColdFusion for all of my development work. (Because CF lets me get a lot more done in a lot less time than say, JSP/J2EE, or PHP, or, heaven help me, ASP, and is really quite robust and has nifty stuff built in for rich forms, speaking to Java/J2EE systems, pdf generation, and truly allows for rapid application development.) That said, I also know that as wonderful as a given tool may be, it's not always going to be the right solution for every eLearning problem. You have to mix and match best of breed tools, and then you'll have something that works well, makes sense, and provides a truly rewarding learning experience for your users.