Full Paper

Helen Carter

Helen_Carter@uow.edu.au

Centre for Educational Development & Interactive Resources

University of Wollongong

At the end of 1993 work began on a series of CAL units to support weekly tutorial discussions in a university subject. In the following year the CAL program, which introduces students to historical methodology, Dispossessed, Diggers and Democrats (DDD), was given its first run. Although initially regarded with some scepticism, the CAL program was received very favourably and has been used ever since. It was developed for the Macintosh platform and runs from CD ROM.

In order to distribute this program more widely negotiations were initiated with a number of publishers. Allen and Unwin were keen and after a market appraisal in 1995, negotiations began in earnest for them to commercially distribute the history CD ROM. When Stephen Draper discusses delivery scenarios, he states that:

The University did not have the requisite experience, wish or, indeed, the infrastructure to proceed with multimedia publishing and so on the 15th April, 1997 the distribution agreement was officially signed with Allen and Unwin. The agreement was to provide an educational multimedia CD ROM on 19th century Australian history and a printed document booklet. The university was to bear all costs of production and packaging with certain requirements to be met with respect to wording and quality and style of packaging. The distributor in turn would market, publicise and distribute the work to the best of their endeavours.

Although the production group had been involved in the development of a number of products which are available for sale commercially, the extent of this had been limited to the delivery of the finished software program. All packaging, marketing, publishing and distribution decisions were made and executed by a third party. It was also true that the group did not have any depth of experience in negotiating agreements with publishers. There is much to be considered and at play in the processes of coming to such an agreement and in formulating its details. Thought needs to be given to: ownership of product; venture risk, negotiating position and capital input; intensity of relationship with publisher and profits and details thereof.

You may have limited influence over many of these factors and each holds some complexity.

The determination of ownership was not a difficult matter. The content providers and the development team continued through from the original work, although it is true to say this was reliant on goodwill as no formal arrangement exists.

The publisher will assess the riskiness of any venture and obviously this will be a factor in any negotiation. The strength of the negotiating position will be affected by the stage at which agreements are being made and level of publisher sponsorship required by the developer.

This was a well established product and finance was found within the university for final development.

It was recognised that this was unlikely to be a volume seller, as perhaps might be expected of a Microsoft product or the like. The intention for any income earned was that it be used to further develop and maintain the product. While "topic and course focused educational products... cannot expect a volume market" (Zelmer 1995, p.578), this product has recently returned a reasonable first royalty payment.

The involvement of the publisher may be as part of the original development team and an investor in the entire process or as the organiser of any combination of copyright clearance, manufacture, marketing and distribution mechanisms. The mix and the depth of commitment to each act as factors in the equation of costs to be carried. These in turn affect the calculations of rights in contract negotiations over the dispersal of any profit made from the product.

In this case the publisher had limited involvement and was sought only for the distribution of the final packaged product. This was our first venture into this area and so there is a degree of "proving oneself" in the marketplace before any further commitment could be or indeed was expected.

The dispersal of any income from a product is completely negotiable and may range from simple sale of product to publisher to royalty-based arrangements. Royalties may be calculated on a sliding scale or be a fixed percentage. Rights of distribution, whether national or international are also subject to determination.

The exact details of the DDD agreement are confidential in terms of the nature and extent, however, it can be said that negotiating with an outside company was by mutual agreement and proceeded amicably.

Other issues which had to be considered in making the agreement were the product price and packaging. The product sale price was more than desired but was negotiated down from the original stated on the contract and this can be reviewed at any time. Consideration was given to the full boxed packaging given to commercial products produced by such organisations as Brøderbund and the like but the cost involved ruled out this option. A four colour cover was designed, including booklet for the CD ROM jewelbox and a glossy cover for the document booklet. The CD ROM could be sold separately or as a shrink-wrapped item with the document booklet. This significantly reduced costs but still gave a professional finish to the product. The University was also responsible for technical support for customers and a contact address was required to be printed with the CD ROM.

Although the contract was not signed until April of 1997, work had commenced in preparation for final publication many months earlier. The program made extensive use of historically relevant, pictorial material, which had to be sourced and copyright requirements met.

As it turned out, the lengthiest part of the project development was the sourcing and seeking of copyright clearance of the pictorial material on the CD ROM. This was all coordinated by Dr. John McQuilton, a senior lecturer from the Department of History and Politics, who was also the major content provider on the CD ROM. Fortunately for the project, he was well versed with searching out copyright for pictorial material from previous (print-based) publishing projects. However, approximately eight months and some thousands of dollars later, copyright clearance, payments and substitute pictures, where required, were ready to go into a publishable version of the product.

The previous discussion has shown there are many issues to be considered before assembling a product for commercial distribution. However, you might observe from the dates that the process does not necessarily happen in a linear fashion: Project development and negotiation went hand in hand. A degree of trust is necessary from both partners in the venture, although development was very driven by distribution deadlines.

In mid-February of 1997 the Interactive Multimedia Production (IMP) unit of the Centre for Educational Development and Interactive Resources (CEDIR) began work on the final version of the history CD ROM. The major facets to this development were:

• Rescanning

• Recoding

• Cross-platforming

• Converting

• Scheduling

At the conclusion of this project a debrief, involving a number of meetings and filling in of evaluation sheets, was conducted. The aims for holding the project debrief were to: Identify problems that arose from working on the History project; Disseminate information about problems and potential solutions to production staff and the educational consultants that typically lead the production teams; Make recommendations to management; Provide a basis for writing a paper on the process.

As a result of the debrief, recommendations were made which could be categorised as relating to the production infrastructure, procedures and communication. Although it is recognised that the recommendations here relate to a specific setup in a specific environment, I think it is useful to leave in the detail to consider just a small amount of the factors involved in multimedia production.

Having the setup to produce multimedia products costs money and money is scarce but we can't produce professional products if we don't have the infrastructure. You need to spend money to be able to produce quality products.

• Permanent set up for CD ROM pressing.
  It is imperative that a permanent set up for CD pressing, including permanent external drives, be established for a production facility and that CD pressing procedures be written down and available with the set up. Ensure that a legitimate version of the CD pressing software is available.
• Establishment of a pool of hard drives.
  Urgent consideration needs to be given to production staff having adequate access to hard drive space. This may require establishment of a pool of hard drives which are allocated for each large project. Whether part-time or full-time, this makes little difference to the size of the project.
• Adequate cross-platform development and testing setup.
  Need to have adequate IBM-compatible PCs for developing and testing if producing cross-platform products. PC testing has to be sufficient to avoid last minute problems. (Note. The majority of development of products is carried out on Macintosh Power PCs within CEDIR.)
• Extent CEDIR can package its computer-based products.
  Serious consideration needs to be given as to what extent CEDIR can package its products. For this to happen, CEDIR would need: a colour laser printer; CD labeller; print capable computer and print software. This would mean CEDIR could publish small runs and demo CDs, which would give a more professional approach, good publicity, more authenticity to us being publishers and better control of our product and deadlines.

The need for good operational procedures is recognised and it is always intended that next time it will be done in the right way, but when deadlines are nearing, some things get lost.

• Product sign off.
  The procedure for alpha testing of products should include a sign off by both the senior programmer and the senior graphic artist. Both staff members indicated that they would like more say in the finished product and in some cases don't get to see them at all.
• Software ordering, re-ordering, registering and securing procedures.
  Procedures need to be developed for ordering, re-ordering and registering software, so as to ensure staff are working with legitimate, registered, latest versions of software. Also, to ensure that disks, dongles, CDs, manuals, etc. are not missing. The responsibility for software needs to be held with one person.

These were factors beyond the scope of the project and really of a more general nature. Communication throughout the project was good but tight deadlines can put strains in unexpected areas.

• Roles and responsibilities of production staff.
  The roles and responsibilities of production staff need to be clearly outlined, as to who provides technical support and who controls the technical production.
• Technical meetings for production staff.
  All production staff require regular technical meetings, one hour per fortnight, for sharing of knowledge and for staff development. IMP employs a significant number of casual staff and they need to be kept up to date, as well as full time staff. It is expected that the need for this would subside and could be replaced by a monthly meeting which would include a program of staff development.
• Debriefing sessions.
  As a result of this debriefing session the management were able to make considerable changes to their operations. Nearly all of the recommendations have been acted upon. It is recommended that debriefing sessions be held at the conclusion of all projects.

Preparation of a CD ROM for commercial distribution involves negotiation over ownership and publishing and copyright to be considered and then there are the technical and internal production issues to resolve. A range of additional concerns arise for universities engaged in the initiative of publishing CD ROM products but just two are discussed here:

As a result of CUTS-D (formerly CAUT) and university-specific innovative teaching initiatives, there are a large number of educational programs developed. The conditions of the grant usually encourage the dissemination of these but experience has shown that there are often significant problems in delivery. Such projects are often developed in university departments geared to teaching and research, which do not necessarily have the support mechanisms in place for delivering and maintaining multimedia software. This may be provided through special support units, such as CEDIR at the University of Wollongong or through collaboration with commercial software houses.

The Internet is viewed by many as an attractive alternative for delivering computer-based product. A system developed using HTML can be delivered via the World Wide Web with a guaranteed delivery platform and can be relatively easily authored. These attractions, however, may be paid for by limitations in educational design. The Internet may well be the primary delivery medium of the future but for the present, there are significant problems in ensuring adequate delivery of multimedia systems. As well, the associated copyright issues are extensive and likely to be a long time before they are properly resolved. Hybrid World Wide Web and CD ROM products are another alternative and although this may allow more flexibility for the type of product that can be delivered, copyright problems still abound.

It is hoped that the reader is left with some appreciation of the complexity of issues involved in the development and commercial distribution of an educational product. This paper merely skims the surface of some encountered in the production of one particular product.

(c) Helen Carter

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