Keep it simple
The field of instructional design and e-learning contains a plethora of articles about the abundance of time it takes to develop an online course. This can be frighteningly true, and your project can quickly get out of hand if you don’t carefully stick to your design plan. Both faculty and design staff are frequent contributors to “scope creep.” This is where the scope of the project grows to include additional features or requirements that were not determine in advance. A certain amount of scope creep is inevitable and should be incorporated into your project plan. However, you need to have a clear idea of how much is too much and will take you over time and over budget.
Like any expert in their field, good instructional designers and faculties have a view of the world that provides for the perfect course for every student. Though this is a laudable goal, it is an unrealistic one in the real world. The perfect course for every student would be highly complex, variable, and ultimately very costly. This is why it is very important to have asked and answered the questions posed above. Then, based on your answers, you must determine how much perfection you can afford in time and budget.
Large e-learning instructional design projects can learn something here from the lessons of extreme programming. Extreme programming is a method used by software developer, working in small to medium-sized teams, to develop software in the face of vague or rapidly changing requirements. Instructional design is often done in face of variable techniques, unknown or changing requirements, and is almost always needed yesterday. So, there are some lessons to share.
The first rule of design in extreme programing is to always have the simplest design that meets the needs of the project. Let’s look at what is the simplest design that meets the needs of e-learning instruction.
The first step in keeping it simple is to determine the criteria for success for your course project. These criteria are not specific topic objective or knowledge-base outcomes. Instead they are the minimal expectations of every course or learning object that is developed within your project. The following items represent the type of generic criteria that a well-developed e-learning course might include: