The development of the Guidelines for the Design of Educational Software began in 1995. At that time, the Accredited Standards Committee Medical Devices 156 (Task Group on Dental Informatics) established Working Group 5 (Educational Software Systems). The charge of this working group was to propose standards for student, patient, and practitioner educational software. More recently, the ASC MD 156 Task Group on Dental Informatics was elevated to the ANSI Standards Committee on Dental Informatics. The Working Group for Educational Software is continuing to develop the Guidelines within the new committee.

The Guidelines have undergone significant development since the inception of this project. In 1998, the project was first described in the literature (1). Subsequently, an evaluation study of the preliminary guidelines with 157 Web-based continuing dental education courses was published (2, 3). The guidelines were then continuously refined, and served as the basis for the inaugural Educational Software Competition of the American Dental Education Association (4). In the spring of 2001, the guidelines were reviewed and augmented in a working meeting of DentEdEvolves, a European consortium of dental schools. The latest revision also includes changes made in response to comments received in early 2001 as a result of posting of the Guidelines for public comment by the Standards Committee on Dental Informatics. The current release, V. 1.2, is the result of this process.

The purpose of the Guidelines is to promote quality in educational software. They do so in two ways. First, developers can use the guidelines to ensure that their products are of high instructional quality during development and evaluation of their products. Second, end users can compare educational software programs with the Guidelines to recognize quality products. For the second goal, we are deriving validated rating instruments for use by instructional design experts and software end users.

We plan to continue to refine the current Guidelines for the Design of Educational Software considerably through discussion among instructional design experts and application to instructional design projects and evaluation studies. We encourage you to review these guidelines and send us your comments using the Comment Form.

1. Johnson L, Schleyer T. Developing standards for the design of educational software. Quintessence International 1999;30(11):763-768.
2. Schleyer T, Pham T. Online continuing dental education. Journal of the American Dental Association 1999;130(June):848-854,877-878.
3. Schleyer T, Johnson L, Pham T. Instructional characteristics of online continuing education courses. Quintessence International 1999;30(11):755-761.
4. Schleyer, T, Johnson, L. Developing a protocol for an educational software competition, Proceedings of the 2002 AMIA Fall Symposium (in print).