Transaction Shells
Zhongmin Li, Margaret Merrill · Journal of Research on Computing in Education · 1990
Courseware development is a bottleneck to the effective use of computers in education. Existing authoring systems allow an instructor to develop instructional materials with less effort than commercial programming languages, but these systems provide little instructional design assistance and still require significant effort. This paper describes a transaction shell approach to courseware development. A transaction shell is an integrated instructional design, development, and delivery environment. Each transaction shell is specifically designed for a set of clearly defined instructional objectives. It includes the predefined instructional strategies most appropriate for its objectives. Authoring with a transaction shell consists of selecting predefined instructional strategies corresponding to the objectives and supplying the content information required by these strategies. Transaction shells enable far more efficient courseware development and include instructional strategies that are often more effective than are possible with authoring languages or systems.