Don't Forget the Instructor's Needs

When designing an online learning Web site, there is more than just the learner's needs that we should consider. In ID, your role may be just as Web site designer and developer, which means both instructor and learner are "users" of your site.

I realized this the hard way, of course. The way I have my site laid out would work if I don't have a lot of material and learner reading can be limited to one or two pages without making the font too small. But since I had a lot of content (or am expecting the instructor to have more than 1-2 pages of content), my pages ended up being very long, requiring the learner to scroll down for miles. Even if I don’t plug all that info on one page – say I break it up into several sections – there is too much clicking forward and back going on. I could have a printer format available in every lesson, but that negates in some way the objective of online learning and making the process paperless to some degree. One of the reasons Jim's wiki works very well is that I don’t have to download it and save it, and then have to root around for the file when I need it. He also came up with an URL that was easy to remember and is accessible from any computer.

To rectify my problem, I have to lay out the heading and navigation buttons up top and leave the rest of the area for content. Of course, since I already submitted my design document and story board, that means I have to redo the project. Drats!