RLO Development: RLO Lifecycle

Each School of Nursing RLO goes through at least the following stages:

Concept. Author(s) have idea for the RLO, but no specification has yet been written.
Specification. Specification is in writing, or has been written and is awaiting review.
Specification peer review. Specification has been written and is under review.
Awaiting development. Specification has been peer-reviewed, and the RLO has been placed in the development queue.
Under development. RLO is being produced in software by the developer.
RLO peer review. The RLO has been produced in software and is undergoing peer-review. It may be placed online for use at this point to allow for student feedback, a sort of 'beta testing'.
Released. RLO peer-reviewed and officially released for use.

In addition, some RLOs go through a stage of student review pre- and/or post-release.

Iterative development

The lifecycle isn't a straightforward linear progression from one stage to the next, but is rather a highly-iterative process involving constant dialogue amongst developer, content author, and 'mentor' (see below). For instance, the first peer-reviewer may identify errors in the content, and/or suggest content changes to improve the RLO, which would then be fed back into the specification document. During development, the developer might propose a particular feature which would necessitate changing the specification, or might identify a feature in the spec which can't be implemented technically. After release, bugs and errors might be found which would require the RLO to go back to the development stage (usually such errors are minor and don't require the RLO to be further peer-reviewed). And so on. In IT-speak, this process is known as "iterative development".

Roles

There are usually three roles associated with the lifecycle:

Content author. The person(s) who write the actual educational content of the object, who are subject experts, and who write the specification, often in consultation with the developer.
Developer. The person(s) who implement the RLO specification in software.
Mentor. The person(s) who guide the RLO through the development process, ensuring that reviews are carried out, technical checks made, and so on.

As with the lifecycle, this represents an 'ideal' situation. In practice, there may be one or more people in each role, and roles may be conflated. Viv Rolfe, for instance, was both content author and developer for her liver and kidney series of RLOs