Development of didactic design guidelines for the production of e-courses

Several software packages make it easy to add voice and video to the same slides used for face-to-face lessons. This is not the best solution for e-courses, since the different delivery context require specific pedagogical redesign. The paper describes the procedures for design and development of courses distributed over the internet to remote and presence students developed at Politecnico di Torino, focusing on the "pedagogical instructions" provided to authors. A "didactical design manual" describes course organization, hierarchy, granularity of learning units and other information that must be provided to the learner. A "production manual" defines roles of people and the rules for production of support material, taking into account SCORM compliance. This methodology can be used with any tool able to integrate and synchronize slides and audio. Courses designed and developed with the described procedure have replaced previous courses in videotapes, with positive feedback from students.