Abstract

The development of instructional software is a complex process, posing high demands to the technical and didactical expertise of developers. Domain specialists rather than professional developers are often responsible for it, but authoring tools with pre-structured templates claim to compensate for this limited experience. This study compares instructional software products made by developers with low production experience (n = 6) and high production experience (n = 8), working with a template-based authoring tool. It is hypothesized that those with high production experience will be more productive and create software with a higher didactical quality than those with low production experience, whereas no differences with regard to technical and authoring quality are expected. The results show that the didactical quality was unsatisfactory and did not differ between groups. Nevertheless the templates compensated for differences in experience because the technical and authoring quality was equal for both groups, indicating that templates enable domain specialists to participate successfully in the production process.

Citation

Boot, E.W., van Merrienboer, J.J.G. & Veerman, A.L. (2007). Novice and Experienced Instructional Software Developers: Effects on Materials Created with Instructional Software Templates. Educational Technology Research and Development, 55(6), 647-666. Retrieved August 11, 2024 from https://www.learntechlib.org/p/67626/.

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Keywords

• Comparative Analysis
• Courseware
• models
• ONLINE SYSTEMS
• Pedagogical Content Knowledge
• Production Techniques
• Technical Assistance