Instead of providing a written lecture, several instructional articles that distill the major concepts addressed in the lecture are more appropriate for online learning. Instructional articles are short and concise documents conveying relevant, critical information to support concepts, procedures, and/or performance-based skills. An instructional article is written specifically to communicate the content-knowledge necessary for improved, more advanced performance. For self-paced courses and online or web-based training, instructional articles function like a sub-chapter of a book—the content is consistent with and essential to an understanding of the overall subject. Yet unlike a sub-chapter of a book, an instructional article is written to stand largely on its own; it can be read and understood independently. This independence is important because flexible navigation in most online courses allows learners to jump easily from one article to another, studying some articles in detail and skipping or skimming others. Although some designers may consider this user behavior undesirable since they have worked hard to plan an optimal path through the course material, skipping and skimming is likely to happen, and we would be wise to design our instructional articles so that we maximize the probability of student success.
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