More thoughts on ‘Surviving Course Development Wars’

http://www.xplana.com/articles/archives/course_dev_wars

This piece by Susan Smith Nash on Xplana made me laugh. I wonder if anyone working in online instructional development in post-secondary *hasn’t* experienced this kind of situation…

Susan offers some very useful advice on how to address these issues. But I have to disagree slightly with one of her initial assertions: “We’re in uncharted territory when it comes to developing new approaches to e-courses, companion sites, online course templates, and facilitated e-learning.”

I know it *seems* like uncharted territory. but only if we consider developing e-learning courses to be unlike every other form of web-based development. There are no doubt differences. But I think there’s enough similarities to regular web development projects that many ID managers would benefit from some of the process thinking that has been evolving there over the past 10 years (and more if we just look at ‘development’ issues, and not just web ones.).

If you look at Susan’s list of recommendations, almost all of them are process-oriented, and many deal with making clear the definitions of roles. This was one thing that really bugged me about working in post-secondary institutions – the idea that every individual institution needed to invent it’s own set of processes ex nihilo, instead of learning lessons from the regular web development industry and software development in general. Sure, even in those other fields there is disagreement and a variety of competing approaches. But if you look at least, you’ll find lots of attempts to define process and roles that, with some modification by someone who understands the issues inherent to *instructional* materials/process, could greatly assist in smoothing over lots of these perennial ‘battles’ that seem to exist when they are not there.

To that end, here’s my 5 minute stab at an Amazon.com list of general web and software development books that could serve as a decent starting point for anyone wanting to adopt process instead of fighting battles. There’s lots more needed than just ‘process’ if you want to have harmonious and excellent development projects, but without it you are almost assured of continual ‘battles.’ – SWL