Apart from thinking about what technology they'll be using, you need to consider the social context of your online learners. Learners are members of social groups -- work teams, school classes, families. These groupings may affect the time and attention learners can give as individuals to your resource, in ways that can impact your instructional design.

Take schoolchildren, for example: School-age learners are usually caught up in powerful formal structures that you must take into account as an instructional designer, if you want your resource to be used. Materials meant for students in an American elementary school may differ from those created for high school students, because instruction is organized differently at the two levels. The organization of instruction, including the way students are grouped and the way teachers are assigned, is an attribute of the larger formal structure -- call it schooling -- that no participant can change unilaterally or easily.

In Elementary Schools...
Elementary school students typically receive instruction in several subjects from a single teacher. They spend most of the school day together. Often their work is organized in projects that integrate multiple skill and content areas simultaneously -- math and reading, for example, or geography and science. Boundaries between subjects may be flexible or indistinct. "Courses" as we knew them in high school and college are not that common.

To learn what kinds of online learning resources elementary-level students can easily use, take a look at a few resources that teachers themselves have created . You'll find many thematic units, along with discrete activities that can be integrated with the local curriculum. Research resources and interactivities seem especially popular with this group.

In High Schools...
High school students, on the other hand, tend to have different teachers for every subject. Boundaries between subjects are distinct. Online tools that extend the facilities of the classroom or science lab are often created with high school students in mind, as are software simulations or difficult-to-find resource collections. Formal courses in clearly-bounded subject areas are also more likely to be useful in high school than in elementary school. And in small or remote high schools, online resources provide learning opportunities that the district might not be able to afford otherwise. Online interdisciplinary resources are likely to be welcome in high school settings, too, because interdisciplinary work is harder to implement locally when teachers are tied up in subject-specific roles and duties.

In Middle Schools...
Middle schools fall somewhere in the middle! Teachers in middle school do not identify themselves professionally in terms of one particular subject as intensively as high school teachers do. They are more like the generalists you find in elementary school. But middle schools in a given district may be affiliated with either a high school or an elementary school, and such institutional affiliation does color the organizational picture. (The middle grades may also be housed in their own facility. ) Also, until recently, middle schools did not face the same level of pressures to teach toward standardized exams. Middle school students are farther along the developmental curve than their elementary school counterparts. For all these reasons, middle schools are often ideal settings for interdisciplinary work that challenges conventional subject boundaries.

So, to be used, your resource must fit in, and to fit in, your design must accommodate some inflexible social realities. At the same time, your distance learning resource must not necessarily conform to established conventions. But if you familiarize yourself with the rules of the game your users must play, you'll be in a better position to stretch, bend or break the rules effectively.