Designing Online Courses: User-Centered Practices.

Abstract Teachers who develop Web-based courses must learn to act like designers; however, the type of design practice one undertakes has more than pedagogical implications. It can have political and ethical implications as well. In this article, I compare two models for design—systems and user-centered—each of which embodies different values. I argue that models of technology design can be applied to the development of Web-based courses and that various forms of user-centered design embody the values most compatible with writing instruction. While acknowledging the difficulties of enacting such models when developing Web-based courses, I present strategies for adopting a user-centered design paradigm in distance learning.

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