Define your program

Define your students

1. Who are they, and what education level are they?
2. What is their level of motivation?
3. How much do they currently know about the topic?
4. How good are their language skills for listening, speaking, reading, and writing?
5. How computer literate are they?
6. What do they expect?
7. What can they cope with academically?
8. What are their demographics?
9. What are their dominant learning styles?
10. If education is 'adding value' to people and organization, what is the value? And will they see it as valuable?

Define your purpose

What do the students need to be able to do at the end of the course? Write a profile of what you want graduates to be able to do. It will need to include supporting skills and specific knowledge. Keep goal statements brief and to the point. If a goal is longer than ten words, try to re-word it. Then check that these goals can be effectively mastered in an on-line environment.

Define your motivators

Why should students study your course? What pressing problems will keep them motivated? What urgent needs are they seeking to meet by doing your course?

Define the problem faced that this learning is meant to resolve. Why is it urgent? As students and virtual scenario members go through the lesson, you can progressively add problems that complicate what they are doing, and keep the tension.

Other possibilities:

• Give realistic examples of problems
• Make tasks competitive
• Put students under time pressure
• Relate to students' felt needs
• Get students to collaborate in groups

Levels of sophistication

How much educational knowledge and programming skill to you have?

While materials have become more sophisticated, the most advanced levels are not always better, cost-effective, or even realistic. A 3D interactive simulation might be excellent for some topics. But if you aren't assured of several million dollars of sales, a much simpler approach that looks good and works well might be a much better way to go.

Educational technology comes in different levels:

• 1st level: Provide information only, e.g. assessment materials and on-job training guidelines.
• 2nd level: Full set of instructions and reading materials, but not interactive. They might be downloadable .doc and .pdf files, but it's basically a paper correspondence course put on-line, It may provide tasks, practice exercises, or information to guide students through a paper book. In this case, interaction is separate, for example, through telephone or email.
• 3rd level: Fully interactive response-based learning. This uses behavioral principles and is very effective if done well, but it is quite impersonal. Nevertheless, the materials actually teach, they are not a passive resource.
• 4th level: Relational learning. Communication and interaction is built into the technology through SMS, email, wikis, videoconferencing etc. so that education is a communal experience.
• 5th level: Interactive simulation in realistic virtual environments.

This is directly related to your programming and interoperability requirements. Before you start too much, familiarize yourself with interoperability requirements. Your material needs to work across different kinds of browsers and monitors.

• 1st level: Text only.
• 2nd level: text and static 2D graphics
• 3rd level: animated 2D graphics
• 4th level: 3D animated graphics
• 5th level: 3D interactive simulation in virtual environments with animated interactive graphics

You'll see how this relates to choosing your level of communication:

• 1st level: Email (asynchronous)
• 2nd level: Telephone, VOIP, chat-rooms  (synchronous)
• 2nd level: SMS, blogs, wikis (asynchronous)
• 3rd level: videoconferencing (synchronous)

Define your strategy

At about this stage, you need to define your strategy. There are two main ones:

• the instructor approach, which is very deductive.
• interactive approaches (constructivist/experiential), which tend to be inductive. The idea is to set up learning problems, challenges or situations, give students resources, and ask them to find the solutions.

Put in a broader sense:

• Instructor: Present all the content, then give exercises to practice and test
• A WebQuest: Inquiry activity where students get most or all information from the Web.
• Problem Based Learning: Give students a poorly structured problem that mirrors real-world problems. This simultaneously develops problem solving strategies, disciplinary knowledge bases, and skills. Can be collaborative.
• Games: Games can be exciting and highly motivating but they need to provide valid educational outcomes. Useful for developing and exploring concepts; using new knowledge; strategic thinking, problem-solving and team work.

Source: www.cooltools.net.au/learning_strategies.htm

The next related item is to choose your level of creativity.

• Students follow a rigid set of steps or understand it in a given way. This is very prescriptive, and is more necessary the lower the qualification. But it's not much short of indoctrination if you use it at higher levels.
• Students follow a distinct set of stages, but need to interpret them for their own situation and figure out what to do. This is a good approach for any higher qualification as it gives guidance and encourages diverse applications, without dictating strict interpretations.
• Students create new systems for their own contexts. This may be application for unique circumstances or real innovation. It can involve tinkering with a given set of stages and compare different theoretical frameworks.
• Students create new systems based on new theoretical frameworks. This is research, as the underlying theory is also different.

At this stage, decide whether your subject needs to have practicum requirements. If you have a practicum component, plan what you will expect of the local supervisor, how often he/she needs to meet with students, and what documentation they should keep. Then plan local induction course.

Select or create graphics

Your graphics need to be consistent with your goals and themes. Be careful; they need to add to the learning, not distract from it. They also need to look contemporary, even if they have a deliberately retro look.