When you meet students in the classroom you give instructions verbally and students can ask your for clarification in in doubt. However, when teaching in blended or online environments you need to make sure that you have written concise and clear instructions for all tasks and that the students know where to find them. Shannon Riggs calls this "technical writing".

"Technical writing, which is writing with a purpose of informing, explaining or providing directions is a critical specialised communication skill for asynchronous instruction. Much of the writing needed for online courses is necessarily technical in nature: weekly overviews, announcements, assignment and exam directions, feedback on student work...These are all passages of writing that are meant to inform or provoke behaviors... Traditional on-campus educators provide much of this content verbally."

(Page 38) Thrive online.

Online instruction has a far greater dependency on the written word to explain, inform and provide direction. As Shannon Riggs says, the technical writer bears tremendous responsibility for the readers' success and similarly online educators bear similar responsibility for their students' success. How comfortable are you with your writing skills?

Here are a few tips, summarised from Shannon Riggs, for you to consider when creating instructions for your students. Remember that by following the advice on this page you will hopefully spend less time answering students' questions about the tasks you give them.

Checklist for "technical writing" for your online courses

Have you written concise texts?
When you write step-by-step instructions do you use bullet lists or numbered lists instead of paragraphs?
Have you divided your text and /or instructions for assignments into short paragraphs?
Have you included white space and /or horizontal lines to help students create an overview of the contents?
When longer texts are necessary, have you made sure that you use the pre-fomatted headings to create a content structure?

Shaping the message to be comprehensible

Good writing helps make up for the lack of opportunity to tell students in person what your really mean by the assignment instructions. In an asynchronous online course you will not have all students assembled at once and this means that your will need to provide all the directions in one document. If instructions are not clear students may complain or drop the class.

Statements of purpose

Begin your text with a statement of purpose. A statement of purpose will allow readers to understand the objective or what they will accomplish. Tell your students what reading the directions will help them do. For example, "this project will give you experience of xxx which is important to xxx". This is like providing students with a map, connecting students to what they know and help them to see how they will soon use the learning experience in the future.

Formatting matters

Formatting is vital to help readers understand the information that they are being given. Use the pre-formatted headings, use bullet lists, write short paragraphs, use the horizontal line feature in Canvas. This allows your to create "white space" which is a vital design feature to help group features together (chunking content)

Writing concisely

Writing for online courses should be concise, trim unnecessary words, avoid redundancy. Use the active voice rather than the passive voice.