Some people mean a learning program that is facilitated by an instructor, has a beginning, a middle, and an end, there are other learners and there are probably activities that individual learners share with other learners in order to build their experiences of the learning. I was one of those people who understood an online course to mean the above.

However, in my workplace, because of the kind of the learning management system that was acquired, an online course is defined quite differently. An online course may consist simply of a text document and followed by an online test. Read and answer the questions. That’s it! Unbelievable! that was my first reaction, and I railed against it. But now that I’ve gotten over my initial shock, I’ve been working on how to inject learner participation, learner agency into a mediated environment that makes static passivity temptingly easy to produce (to me at least, considering the incredibly short timelines I have to produce).

I’m currently preoccupied with producing scenarios in rich media and how to make these as engaging as possible while keeping an eye on the bandwidth hygiene. I’ve learned how to use Macromedia’s Captivate; however, I dislike how the object is a movie. I’ve just re-discovered Udutu and am excited how it combines Captivate’s movie-making with web-page hyperlinking.

No matter what the capabilities of the tool and the cool-factor of the object that it produces, I am convinced that an engaging story/narrative that the learner can identify with is more important and more motivating.