We could call Online Course anything that teaches and that is accessed online. However, there are many types of online courses. We need to understand the different types and which one is the one that our client needs.

When Shelter-in-Place started, many Higher Education (HE) faculty moved their face to face class to Zoom or Webex. And that became an online course. This course is delivered just like the synchronous face-to-face lecture, but with no need for colocation. Moreover, these online Zoom or Webex meetings could be recorded, and arguably the course could be repeated as many times as needed without additional work from the instructor. But these are not the type of courses that we are interested in here.

We are looking for online courses that are asynchronous and not collocated. However, even inside these courses, we have different types. We could have courses where the instructor interacts with the learner and courses where the instructor does not interact with the learner. This is a very important distinction and needs to be identified early in the design process. Nonetheless, it is important to notice that we could develop many individual modules where the learner does not interact with the instructor, but those modules are embedded inside a larger course where there is instructor interaction. This combination is very common in HE.

The next issue to distinguish is if the learner is going to interact with the module or not. A simple video can be an online course. Students watch the video at their leisure and in the place of their choosing. If this is your course, you should then try to make that video very short (no more than 15 minutes) because the attention span of today’s student is extremely low (in fact, it is less than one minute, but hopefully a student eager to learn will stay on for those 15 minutes). And you should also make sure that it is crystal clear with respect to both audio and video because most students will playback your video at 1.5X or 2X speed. So, play it like that yourself and check if you can understand what is being said.

Just like the video, we can have a PowerPoint presentation. This presentation might go in a straight line, or it could branch out. One could argue that a branching presentation implies that the learner is interacting with the material. And while that is true, it is a very poor interaction.

The next level, and this is the one that we want to develop using Adobe Captivate, is a course in which the learner has continuous and rich interactions with the system. These are interactions in which the learner needs to process the material that was presented, think, and make decisions or calculations. These interactions are often labeled as quizzes or surveys. However, those names often imply that there is a grade or that someone will see how well the learner performed. And that should not be the case. The idea here is to use the quizzing capability to engage the learner into using the material that was taught and provide feedback. And that feedback can be in the form of providing more exercises and also more teaching. In other words, we have a branching presentation where the learner does not say where they want to go, but the system decides where they should go based on the result of the interaction.

In summary, we can have (1) videoconference courses, (2) video courses, (3) basic branching courses, and (4) interactive courses. And we should also consider that the instructor might or might not be available to interact with the learner.