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 Interactive Information Ltd. |
Obstacles to Growth
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PATSy's research was focussed on the representation of the training material, and its effective presentation to learners and researchers. Adding new material presented often presented new design challenges, and formed part of the task of developing the system. As a result, the database was populated by the system developers on an "ad hoc" basis.
As the system matured, however, attention focussed on turning it into a practical system which could be included in teaching and research programmes across a wide range of institutions.
There was plenty of interest in using the system.
However, PATSy allows educators to `personalise' content by submitting their own references, demonstration cases, tutorial questions, and comments about any of the cases on the system. These kinds of contributions, which can easily involve hundreds of specific data items, can be shared with other users nationally or reserved for local use. Researchers may also submit case data and multimedia material to support their reports of cases in journal publications (as a kind of online appendix).
Moving to a wider user community would inevitably increase the demand for this kind of material to be added to the system.
PATSy had matured to the point where adding material was a well-defined task, and it was clearly not appropriate for the researchers who developed the system to continue to be responsible for adding material to it. However, since the project's focus had been on the presentation of material, no attempt had been made to provide a coherent interface for adding material. As a result, it was still an error-prone task that needed a detailed knowledge of how the system operated.
Getting material into the system threatened to be a bottleneck that would limit PATSy's adoption as a practical teaching tool.
The solution was clear: PATSy needed an interface that would allow any authorised user to add data their own data to the system.
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