Chapter 19: An Instructional Design Approach for Effective Shovelware: Modifying Materials for Distance Education

There has been a rapid proliferation of online courses and shareable content objects. These courses often include a vast array of information, yet they are not instructionally sound. The primary purpose of this article is to provide a procedure (tool) that will help instructional designers determine if existing e-learning courses and sharable content objects are well designed instructionally, or primarily a collection of information posted as a “course” (shovelware). The procedure employs a reverse engineering approach to produce an analysis of the content and instruction. An instructional design model is then used to determine the instructional adequacy of the materials.