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

Subculture
The history of computers in composition parallels a kind of subculture in English and composition departments. Many of the instructors and graduate students who were first to explore and experiment with new computer technologies came from a dungeons-and-dragons-type gaming background. In fact, one of the most pervasive educational technologies in composition studies is the MOO, a virtual geographic space much like a chat room where people meet and which developed from the intranets people originally constructed in order to play role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons. These original spaces were called MUDs, for Multi-User Dungeon or Multi-User Dimension, while MOO stood for MUD, Object-Oriented. MOOs are called object-oriented because they are usually designed around an imaginary group of buildings such as Conference Centers and Cafés where people can meet for academic discussion. Sometimes computers and composition scholars will even meet for academic discussion in a MOO and then decide to meet later in a MUD to play non-academic role-playing games with each other.

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