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

Variation
Interestingly, just as distance learning programs resist the traditional university model, individual instructors’ online composition courses often defy long-standing teaching methods. Online courses under this model are usually oriented around a collaborative model of education where students teach each other through discussion rather than receiving knowledge solely from the instructor. This has been dubbed the student-centered approach as opposed to teacher-centered pedagogies (Huba & Freed, 2000, pp. 2-6). The semi-subversive history of these online courses’ development has also tainted them in many composition departments where opinions about the effectiveness of computer-mediated communication (CMC) are dispersed along a spectrum that includes two extremes: traditionalists who believe that CMC is “substandard . . . and potentially antagonistic” and technology enthusiasts who see CMC as “hyperpersonal” and better than traditional interaction (Condon, et. al., 2001, p. 197). Because of this span of opinion, instructors often receive little scholastic credit for their efforts to incorporate new technologies and develop new curricula. Furthermore, because most of these courses developed slowly as instructors added new technologies to their traditional classes, they are less often fully online and more often hybrid marriages between face-to-face and online elements, therefore, hard to place into any one category. There is also much more variation in methods and content between different courses than those born from either the traditional university mode or from standardized distance learning programs. Finally, one of the biggest problems with these individual instructors’ approaches to online courses is that, because they are less formal and more varied, instructors often neglect to formally assess their courses.

In sum, the reason online composition courses vary so much relates to their history of emerging from two different groups with very different philosophies: distance learning proponents and individual composition instructors. Table 2 represents a summary of the general characteristics of these two approaches to online composition.

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