Consultant Media Developers taken on

15th July , 2004

Four new consultant media developers have been engaged to develop RLOs, on an 'as and when' basis. This follows an advert placed on a jobs bulletin board for Nottingham University students and graduates, calling for Media Developers with experience in one or more of Flash, Director, Java and Dreamweaver. Applicants were interviewed by Fred Riley and Heather Wharrad last week.

These new developers are current or recent students of the university, and have very impressive technical pedigrees. They will each be paid a set fee for each RLO they develop, and will liaise directly with RLO content authors. This should relieve what up to now has been a bottleneck in the RLO production process, whereby content authors have written RLO specifications only to find them put in a queue for development due to there only being one full-time and one consultant technical author available. With these four appointees, there's now a 'panel' of five RLO developers available, as well as the full-time developer (Fred Riley), and this should speed the RLO 'production line' considerably.

Understandably, some would-be RLO content authors have been reluctant to commit time to writing RLO specifications when they might have to wait months for the RLO to be developed and go online. It's very much hoped that content authors will now be encouraged to come forward with specifications, and any member of staff who is interested in writing RLOs should contact Fred Riley or Heather Wharrad.

This consultancy arrangement for Media Developers has been necessitated by the contingent nature of the funding available for RLO development. It's hoped that in the future a more stable source of funding will be identified which will allow the School to take on at least one more Media Developer on a contractual basis.

If any School colleagues have received funding for e-learning development and would be interested in developing a RLO, you can use part of the funding to buy out a developer.