What is the effect of the Curriculum Outline Development Integration Tool process on the working environment of instructional designers at Cisco

Curriculum Outline Development Integration Tool (CODIT v1) is a Microsoft Corporation Inc.'s Office base software program demonstrating how Office can help implement Cisco's Reusable Learning Object Strategy (RLO Strategy) (Barritt, 2001). The CODIT was written to help Instructional Designers (IDs) working in the ACCELERATE Program, an initiative with in Cisco, to generate reports and check the compliance of instructional content with the RLO Strategy.; CODIT v1 was implemented quickly and its success revealed that it was hard to maintain, extend and the user interface did not encourage IDs with average word processing skills to use all its features. In order to improve the CODIT v1 the question was posed, "What is the effect of the Curriculum Outline Development Integration Tool process on the working environment of instructional designers at Cisco?"; This project used action research techniques (Stringer, 1999) combining a formative evaluation (Palys, 1997; Scriven, 1999; Tessmer, 1993) and a rapid prototyping development model to improve the CODIT. This report shows how a revised CODIT improved the ability of IDs to generate reports and shows how a graphical representation of complex documents can dramatically reduce the time required for compliance checking. The recommendations in this report are not generalizable.