Each School of Nursing RLO goes through at least the following stages:
In addition, some RLOs go through a stage of student review pre- and/or post-release.
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".
There are usually three roles associated with the lifecycle:
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