For many institutions, online course development follows a publishing model. Faculty members are recruited and compensated to “author” content that will be used by multiple instructors. This approach has several advantages:

1. Greater Accountability: Expectations can be clearly spelled out (and enforced) through a course-development contract.
2. Higher Quality: Course materials are often edited by an instructional designer and reviewed by other instructors.
3. Greater Efficiency: Ideally, faculty don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time they teach a new course. The initial effort of the course author and instructional designer to create a core set of course materials saves future instructors a great deal of time in the long run.

There are also disadvantages to the publishing model. Perhaps the most commonly cited problem is the cost to the institution. Faculty who develop online courses are usually compensated with course releases and/or one-time payments comparable to what the instructor would receive to teach a single course. In addition, having course materials thoroughly edited by an instructional designer and reviewed by a panel of subject-matter experts can easily add several thousand dollars to the development costs of each course. Add usability/accessibility optimization, visual design improvements, and multimedia enhancement to the process, and the total cost per course can easily exceed $10,000.

Ten-thousand dollars can be a particularly hard number to swallow when compared to the cost of developing face-to-face courses. After all, faculty have been developing traditional courses without additional compensation for a very long time (and in K-12, the added costs of enhancing a course often come out of the instructor’s pocket). Of course, there are many arguments as to why online course development merits a considerable initial investment, such as:

• Faculty are paid to be subject-matter experts, not technology experts.
• The quality of the materials will be better as a result.
• Online learning brings in tuition dollars that the institution wouldn’t otherwise receive.
• The cost per course decreases every time the same materials are reused.

The problem that none of these arguments addresses is that many instructors (at least in my experience) simply don’t want to be required to use hand-me-down course materials. For as long as teachers have existed, many of them have shared syllabi, lecture notes, exams, and assignment concepts with their colleagues. I think most instructors value this tradition, but only when the materials are provided with no obligation.

As an instructional designer and a part-time instructor, I feel torn between two worlds. On the one hand, I recognize the benefits of clear, specific course objectives. I also see the value in providing standardized supporting materials to ensure students can meet those objectives. Yet, I also know that one of the best aspects of teaching as a profession is that you get to be the captain of your own ship (however humble it may be). You have a great deal of autonomy and, ideally, you’re free to experiment with teaching and assessment methods that might be a bit unusual as long as students master the critical course concepts.

I appreciate it when my colleagues offer to share their course materials with me, and I love to hear about what they’ve learned from their own experiences. At the same time, we have very different opinions about how to teach a course on basic web design. Some require students to write all their HTML by hand in Notepad and some introduce FrontPage on day one. I offer my students a compromise: we spend the first few weeks hand-coding before we switch to Dreamweaver.

None of our approaches have been criticized, which is fine by me since I’d sooner give myself an appendectomy with a spork than get reacquainted with FrontPage. However, that’s not to say I’m a curriculum-development anarchist. I do wish at times that my fellow interactive-design professors and I could all agree on a few things, like not introducing advanced tools like Flash or languages like JavaScript in a course where many students struggle with basic file-management concepts. Of course, I’m afraid to push for standardization because I, like many teachers, enjoy doing things my way, and I don’t want to find myself forced to teach from a pile of second-hand course materials. In the end, I like to think there’s a happy medium that embraces the best parts of the publishing model of course development while giving faculty the freedom they crave. Until then, you’ll find me slaving away over a hot laptop, creating course materials from scratch and complaining about the workload all the while.