What Makes an Online Course?

In the late 90’s and the online early days of online course development, most online courses were created by a cadre of educators who believed information technology could transform learning. These people were willing and able to master the skills, including programing, HTML and Java and the intricacies of vectors. Often they recreated an existing course and each course offering had an individualistic structure and those creating it might not have uses good instructional design.

Those individuals figured out things on their own and their results were put together with whatever resources the creator had. In the late 90s, a number of groups of course developers began to share their thoughts, methods and skills.

The ADDIE (Analyze, Design, Develop, Implement and Evaluate) Model of instructional design, developed at the University of Florida, became a common method for workplace and computer based training. However, developing and delivering an effective online course contained elements that required pedagogy and technology expertise only a few instructional developers considered. For example - pedagogy. This implies that the instructor can develop targeted learning objectives. Online instruction is more than converting a PowerPoint to a video. Planned instructional design demands linking learning objectives to learning activities and measurable outcomes.

Few trainers or online training developers have had formal education or training in instructional design or learning theory. Expecting them to master the instructional design and technological skills needed to put a well-designed course online could be improbable. . The best case scenario is to pair an instructional/training designer with someone with the computer and graphic skills. This way, each of them can bring skills to the course-creation process.

Next...What is a course and why put it online.

Is "Technical" is now more important than the "Writing"?

I have been writing technical white papers, training documents and on-line help for over 25 years now. At the beginning, I was a programmer who had a facility for writing and telling people, in words they could understand, how to use the software they were expected to learn. What I want to know is, “How the market shifted from an emphasis on communication and letting people how to do what they need to do, to an emphasis on technical knowledge?”
One of the major trends I have I have noticed over the years, is that writing is a commodity that is not valued. I don’t know how things got to be this way, but I have some guesses.

1.      Self Publishing on the internet can be done by anyone. This leads people to believe if I create it, I can tell people about it “anyone can write.” If anyone can write, value shifts from writing skills to technical knowledge. While many people can fake or claim writing ability, they can’t do so with technical knowledge.

2.      We’re so used to seeing poor writing—especially on the internet, in everything from blogs to magazines to help manuals and more….the general standard for what passes as publishable has dipped far enough that now anyone who can type, can write. Again, the Internet here is a reason for the transformation. Taking this into consideration, many educational institutions have added a technical writing course for their technical graduates (just as in the past, where one had to have a basic Writing course in in other subjects). Just because one has taken a technical writing course, does not mean, they know how to communicate a complex subject.

3.      A third reason why people have come to value the technical more is because the world has become much more technical, and the level of knowledge has become highly specialized. One doesn’t merely know how to program. Today there are more than a dozen programming languages to know — PHP, C#, C++, Fortran, Java, .NET, Ruby, Python, Perl, Javascript, and more. And it’s not just programming, but every IT field has followed similar trends.

4.      Proliferation of Technical Writing/Training Degrees/Educational Institution Designations. Those in mainstream post-secondary education are going to disagree with me on this. Colleges and Universities have come from a system where rapid change does not happen. Because curriculum takes so long to develop and the amount of money invested in developing it is significant, they cannot keep up to rapid changes that happen in the writing and teaching about Computer Software industry. Instructors can only teach the basics of how people learn, how they assimilate knowledge. The tools the students learn to use and the software and programming languages they learn to write about change significantly each year.

To help mitigate all this complexity, programmers created  some writing tools that are what they call “Single Sourcing”. Single Sourcing are  content management systems created to allow the same source content to be used multiple ways to create better documentation. The benefits of single source publishing are better for the editor rather than the user, If the editor is not skilled, the content is most often virtually useless to an unskilled end user. However, technical users, those familiar with what is to be done (and often the testers of the documentation) do not notice this! What may seem inherently obvious (to the skilled user) is totally neglected.
Further, In the field of technical help authoring, writing is not the only skill. There are more than  dozen tools and technologies to know — Flare, RoboHelp, Author-it, DITA, SharePoint, XMetal, Captivate, Camtasia, XML, CSS, HTML, InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, Flash, and so on. Each year, there are more and more entries. When I started there were 4 main softwares, NONE of which are still being used (except Snagit).
When you combine the ability to use the writing/authoring tools with the technical software creation tools, with technical programming (or usage) skills, with an ability to communicate the “how” to the end user--you can easily see the basic law of supply and demand causes the market to place higher value on technical knowledge.
No wonder so many people don’t like using complex software!