Applying the Principles
Principles are great, but how do we apply them? How do we transform this great advice into online
courses that are more interesting and effective for adult learners?
In our experience over several decades of developing and delivering traditional and technology-enhanced
training in the corporate world, we have often witnessed the gap between good principles and their
application. In the remainder of this article, we suggest ways to avoid this gap by examining one common
online teaching strategy — the instructional article — in detail and explaining how the ideas we have
discussed so far can be put into practice.
Instructional Article Principles
While adult learning tends to be more problem-centered than content-centered, it is still usually
necessary for students to learn specific knowledge prior to moving on to more advanced levels of
performance. In many classroom courses, this knowledge is gained through the time-honored instructional
method called a lecture. Unfortunately (fortunately!), reading long lectures on the web will not work.
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