3. The editing process is iterative

In general, and this is more and more the case, material of any kind is not produced in a single session. Instead, a first version is produced, discussed, and then modified. The second version will also be criticized and enhanced. The editing process is thus, for most authors, an iterative one. Course material often goes through many iterations over several years before being eventually transformed into a textbook. This textbook will in turn need a new edition, and so on.

In our opinion, the elaboration of an electronic course material must follow a similar process. It will need to evolve and adjust in accordance to the experience gained in the use of the course. This is actually the function of the field tests recommended by the Swiss Virtual Campus. Of course, the short time period devoted to one or two tests is too short to really check the relevance of the chosen writing options.

It can also be noted that a flexible editing process will not only be used to correct and enhance previous versions of the course, but that it also enables the teachers to make choices and additions to accommodate partial changes of content, that all teachers perform over the years. It is therefore necessary to examine what editing strategies and techniques are most appropriate to enable teachers to keep their course material “alive” by making, at the appropriate time, all needed changes to the course material in an easy and at inexpensive manner.

Because producing material for the web requires that this material be judged by is appearance on the web, it is desirable that a web version of the content be produced for each iteration. This can become time- and resource-consuming. Recent incarnations of the mainstream word processing programs allow to directly save documents into a web format, but the result of this translation is not suitable, as it only aims at producing a web page that looks exactly as a paper page.

It is now time to ask this simple question: how can we help authors to best do their job? One way that can be most profitable to help authors is to give them a way to keep working within a familiar environment, in which they can concentrate on the creation, edition and revision of their material.