Distributed group design process: Lessons learned

Abstract

A typical Web-based training development team consists of a project manager, an instructional designer, a subject-matter expert, a graphic artist, and a Web programmer. The typical scenario involves team members working together in the same setting during the entire design and development process. What happens when the team is distributed, that is when the instructional designers and the developers are not in the same setting? How can a geographically dispersed team work together meaningfully? What are the challenges they will face and how can they be overcome? Because it is becoming more common for instructional technologists to be brought in from several locations long-distance team building presents an important challenge to the process. This paper addresses several issues that instructional designers face when working in such distributed environments based on our experiences during a collaborative project between Syracuse University and a multi-national corporation. Toward this end, we propose using Web-based CSCW