2. Authoring is hard work

Authoring a virtual course is thus a very different experience for an academic than writing course scripts, textbooks or scientific articles. Often, this requires the complete reformulation of otherwise available material. Once again, not only the scientific competence of authors, but also their willingness to adapt to new conditions are required. Instead of enjoying the freedom offered by electronic media to produce unlimited amounts of materials, authors need to concentrate on identifying the most important contributions in each lesson and to make sure that these concepts come across clearly. Only in related materials (that by far not all students will read and understand) may they use the freedom to add larger amounts of material. As always, authoring remains the art of carefully putting together concepts and ideas in a tight and understandable package.

The process of producing material for a web-based course is also often frustrating, because if requires very qualified persons – the authors – to take into consideration entirely new ways of operating, sometimes with more restrictions than they are used to in the process of producing other text material : while the use of color is free on the web, some other layout techniques such as headers and footers, absolute placement of elements, multi-column text are indeed more complicated to produce than in a typical word-processing program. While the flexibility of HTML tables is very large, they have very limited features to enhance them (customized borders for instance), or these features do not produce uniform content in all browser-platform configurations.

This problem is often avoided by having the authors produce their material in their usual fashion (text, slides, etc.) and then have it translated into HTML by specialized personnel. This process, while efficient for the initial creation of the material, rapidly becomes unmanageable if the authors desire to regularly modify their material.