E-LEARNING COURSE DESIGN PROCESS

E-courses should be planned more sensitively than stationary lessons because there is little room for spontaneous actions of the teacher only. We suggest to divide the e-course design process into three stages. The first stage consists in defining a general template of the course in terms of three attributes: organization, communication and methods of access to course materials. The second stage aims at determining the domain and the scope of the content to be taught at the course. In the third stage the course designer has to form blocks, i. e. to fill the template produced in the first stage with content units provided in the second stage. The project of any block (e-lesson) should consist of the following elements: the topic and educational goals, description of rules, communicationn manners and tools, structure (the order of materials and mechanisms of their presentation) and specification of (atomic) learning objects with regard to the applied media and the role in the course: teaching object, teacher's action and student activity. Special care must be taken of communication (between teacher and students and between students)-this is one of the basic formal differences with respect to the project of a traditional lesson (lesson plan). Other differences consist in a change of the main part of the project: instead of a description of the course of a lesson there is a rather ordered list of elements, since there is no way to control the sequence of user actions in an e-course.