The History of Online Course Development:
Individual Composition Instructors Teaching Online

Small Beginnings
As opposed to the top-down distance learning approach to higher education, the second approach from which online composition courses have developed is through the "bottom-up" individual efforts of composition instructors. These instructors are enthusiastic about technology and therefore independently add innovative methods to their traditional courses. In fact, this group of technology-passionate instructors has grown into a self-selected group who now comprise their own subfield of composition: Computers and Writing, also known as the Fifth C (Computers, after Conference on College Composition and Communication). Interestingly, many in this group are younger, non-traditional instructors, including adjuncts, and graduate students at colleges, and professionals in publishing houses and software companies. And ironically, many of the online tools now standardized by distance education programs were developed by graduate students and non-traditional educators. For example, writing scholar Fred Kemp (1994) reminds us that the creators of synchronous (same-time) conferencing consisted of "groups of basically younger professionals who have no stake in long established methods and who feed off of the enthusiasms of their peers."

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