Supporting the Application of Design Patterns in Web-Course Design

Many instructors are expected to design and create web courses. The design of web courses can be a difficult task for educators who lack experience in interaction and instructional design. Design patterns have emerged as a way to capture design experience and present design solutions to novice designers. Design patterns are a widely accepted method of providing design support to software engineers, and they have been proposed to support designers of web-based courses. However, end-users’ abilities to use design patterns are unclear especially since web-course design and computer programming are different activities. We present a methodology for supporting novices’ use of patterns during webbased instructional design. This methodology consists of a pattern language for web-based instruction and a design environment that scaffolds the process of finding, selecting, and applying patterns to design problems.