Attention Control Freaks!

We have many clients who develop continuing education courses (for CPE credit, licensing) and as a result many of our initial conversations center around the various States licensing mandates for online courses that award professional development credits.

All states are different but some common requirements include the following:

• A minimum amount of time spent reading the course content: This is done with timers and the more "enlightened" agencies require a total amount of hours spent reading for an entire course. The more stringent ones will impose per page time constraints. Just imagine a teacher hanging over your shoulder at HOME, forcing you to stay on a particular page regardless of how long it takes you to read it.
• Sequencing Constraints: This is sometimes referred to as "locking the navigation" and it forces users to look at page 1 before they can move on to page 2 and so on. This, of course, is regardless of how well the student knows the material on a certain page. Now imagine that same teacher telling you that you can't go to the outline of a book and pick which topic you want to read but instead you have to look at each page in order.
  
• User Verification: Usually user verification takes the form of questions that pop-up every so often that ask the user to answer certain personal things: basic profile information (name, address, zip code etc) or secret questions that were answered during registration. I do think that the future will be provide more foolproof ways of ensuring that the user is actually who they say they but this does not accomplish that.
  

The article Here's Why Unlocking Your Course Navigation will Create Better Learning, posted on The Rapid Elearning Blog provides some very insightful reasons why these types of user controls are NOT conducive to learning and in fact often create the opposite effect.

Ultimately, it is important to focus on the outcomes of the course and put your efforts into creating effective, engaging content that truly meets the course objectives. And don't forget that well developed assessments (yes, even multiple choice, true/false exams) can accurately measure the abilities of your students.