Training authors to develop educational software through the adoption of foreign software

Abstract Until recently, educational software in the F.R.G. was not sufficient, nor of adequate quality to meet the needs of German schools. To overcome this problem, in 1988 an international collaboration was set up between the Institut fur die Padagogik der Naturwissenschaften and the Educational Computing Unit at King's College London to provide training for German authoring teams to evaluate and produce educational software. This collaboration, which has been supported by several of the Lande, the British Council, and the publishers CoMet-Verlag, has resulted in the training of 25 people working in 6 groups, and the production of 10 educational software packages in the first phase and a similar number of software groups and packages with new teams in the second phase. The primary objective is the qualification of educational software authors, the secondary objective is the development of courseware for German-speaking schools. This paper discusses some of the issues and problems identified in the collaboration, and compares the successes of this method of training and software production with methods recommended by other international organisations.