William Overington

inventor@ngo.globalnet.co.uk

21 February 1998

I wish to encourage the following infrastructure. It is an attempt to interface the commercial needs of advertising revenue funded commercial electronic publishers with the academic needs of learning package authors in order to achieve the goal of a significant amount of free to the end user distance education on the world wide web.

I suggest the following.

That a number of electronic publishers provide on the world wide web, free of charge to end users, quality distance education learning packages with some tutorial support, funded by revenue from ethical advertising carried in routing pages and indexes yet not within the learning packages themselves.

That some of these electronic publishers agree, perhaps through the good offices of a trade association or similar, to organize and to fund the establishment of an independent company that issues tokens in bulk to the electronic publishers in exchange for money, and accepts back those tokens in small aggregated quantities from collectors and provides goods and services to the collectors in exchange for those tokens. This would take the form of incorporation of the independent company and of guaranteeing some initial purchasing of tokens in order to get the system started. This might possibly be as a non-profit company if this were thought by the electronic publishers to be the best format. The goods and services received would be chosen by each of the collectors from the range available. The tokens may be in physical or electronic form.

That the electronic publishers issue the tokens to individual learning package authors in exchange for individual licenses to publish duly submitted learning packages of specified format and content. Also, the publishers issue the tokens to tutors for providing tutorial support. In the case of electronic tokens, the publisher sends the tokens electronically to the independent company for recording to an account for the benefit of the individual author or tutor.

The independent company could also employ a number of tutorial staff at a regular salary.

The goods and services to include specially produced textbooks.

The goods and services to include payment for assessment of a portfolio of work by a duly accredited college.

The goods and services to include the management of a society for free to the end user distance education learning package authors and tutors where society dues are paid entirely in tokens.

The society members would be consulted by the independent company from time to time as to the range of goods and services to be made available in the independent company's catalogue of goods and services.

My hope is that this suggested infrastructure will find favour with electronic publishers as an effective way to gather a good and continuing supply of learning packages for free to the end user distribution on the world wide web and be seen as providing incentives to people to spend time being a learning package author and tutor. I suggest that as some of the goods and services would not be obtainable elsewhere at all there may be an incentive to spend time authoring and tutoring where a solely financial reward would not have the same incentive. In addition a system effect of the infrastructure may be the emergence of a properly accredited qualification in free to the end user distance education learning package authoring and tutoring which would be a useful qualification opportunity.