Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Designing an Online Course

Designing an On Line Course

I have been intrigued about the design of an On Line Course ever since I wrote one … The One Act Play Course. In the process I got to thinking about how an On line course differs from a traditional classroom and how an E-Workshop differs from a physical workshop. There were some aspects of both I felt were advantages and disadvantages. For example the convenience of an On Line class gave it a distinct advantage over a traditional workshop and the conventional classroom gave a student a human being to interface with.

So it seemed to me a designer needed to develop the inherent advantages and try to compensate for the lack of a real live teacher. My first attempt was to take other classes and model mine after what I felt were some of the best features they had to offer. As I got some experience under my belt I started getting ideas of how an E-Class could be made more interesting and take better advantage of some of the features that WDC had to offer.

In developing my latest class, The Exploratory Writing Workshop I decided to have a contest as one of the design features. I saw a lot of people participating in contests at WDC and writing some pretty good material. Often this caused me to think, WOW! If this writer got involved in a larger work they certainly have the potential to make a success of it. There needed to be a class that launched these flash fiction and short story writers towards bigger and better things.

Still what I was seeing in the One Act Play course was a lack of discipline and not all that clear an understanding of how to optimize the science of some of the longer forms of literature. What I was seeing was that somewhere beyond a short story the complexity of the form expanded beyond the capability of the mind to manage it without some developmental work and prior planning. The Nano writers understand this and there are a number of groups that work to provide a framework and structure before these marathon writers suit up and take off running. Without this developmental work and a structure there has to be a drop off in quality. However the problem goes well beyond this.. A writer needs a good story line to start with and well developed characters….Then they need write a few vignettes to see where some of the germs of their ideas are going and get settled in before they go racing off into the sunset. What struck me was that as talented as some were they needed to develop a new mind set when taking on a larger work. They needed a launch platform as a jumping off point.

This class would be as traditional as I could make it. There would be lesson plans with objectives and daily lectures. These lectures would be posted five days a week and attempt to simulate a student teacher rapport. In all there would be eight lessons and forty Lectures.

Each week a lesson would have the objectives incorporated in a prompt that would define the requirements of the weekly contest vignette. From Wednesday to Sunday would be a daily lecture that covered one or more of the weekly objectives. The student could continue to write vignettes in their comfort zone but be guided by a structured method designed to head them in the right direction and get them off to a good start, with the structure and ingredients necessary to writing a novel, screen or stage drama.

The start point would be character development and understanding the importance of discovering the Central Character in a Story (CC). A CC is often misunderstood by a writer and frequently late arriving onto the scene. One of the reasons readers often find it difficult getting into a story is because the CC is not in evidence. By central that is what I mean, CENTRAL…not a character who creeps around the fringe of a story peeking in the window. This is someone who owns the story and needs to plop down early, right in the middle of things…

In my One Act Play course I was amazed at the problems students had in discovering who the CC was. Often they would start out thinking they knew when it was really somebody else. So I thought why not let the student follow their muse to begin with and get to know their characters before deciding who to pick for the Oscar winning role. This was a real advantage of the format because at the end of the workshop nothing was locked in cement and the serious writing had yet to really begin. So at the start the student could assume that any of the characters had the potential for becoming the CC.

So I’ll tell the students to think about who this special person is. Have them develop in their mind’s eye as sharp an image as possible. To cast about in books or magazines or photographs for an image that represents what they he/she looks like. Then on their first vignette start with that image at the top of the page. So that’s the plan. For the next month I’ll be keeping you posted on how everything is coming.