AbstractIn an effort to reduce the expensive resource requirements in courseware production and to allow effective management of, and communication and collaboration between authors, a model is needed to harmonize the diverse theoretical backgrounds such a process requires. To this end we look at five abstract models which where chosen for their apparent appropriateness within the general area of collaborative authoring and reuse of multimedia courseware. These models consist of a functional model of hypertext, an infrastructure model for an open collaborative authoring system, two object‐oriented communication models, and a courseware production model. We attempt a consolidation of these models and ultimately make several conclusions, which are exposed during a conceptual harmonisation. The principal conclusion is that a hypermedia logical model is not by itself adequate to support collaboration and reuse. Our modeling conclusions have driven the design of a system which will be implemented and teste