Critical Mass in E-Education

Technology innovations by default are designed to be generic - discussion boards, LMS, learning objects, Semantic Web technology, OWL, and SCORM. However, educational artifacts that are created employing these technologies, in most cases, could only be utilized locally within classrooms, within courses, and within institutions. This is so because while employing these generic technologies educators customize the resultant artifacts to suit individual needs. Hence, when being used, the scope of these artifacts are localized to classrooms, courses, or at best institutions. Thus, instances of SCORM-based courses, learning objects, and discussion boards are, in most cases, localized, in spite of their potential to be interoperable. A natural follow up question to ask is, what more can technology innovations do to make their application mainstream in e-education? We can approach this question by associating a ldquocritical massrdquo measure for each recognized educational technology. Once the critical mass is surpassed the corresponding educational technology innovation could be said to be mainstream.