Much courseware has been developed recently; but not all of it is of high quality, nor is all of it based on educational theories. Our purpose in this study is to support the design of high quality courseware that reflects instructional strategies and supports the design easily, especially for novice designers. The instructional model ontology of expert knowledge and experience is constructed using SMARTIES, an authoring tool. Designers can develop their courseware efficiently using this instructional model ontology. We demonstrate the efficacy of the courseware development through an experimental study that included experimental and comparative groups. We found from survey results of the experimental group that designing courseware through the instructional model ontology of SMARTIES improves the quality of the courseware and it is much more helpful for inexperienced designers. Overall, our method led to the design of courseware that was more concrete and more faithful to instructional strategies.
