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.

Great Advice for Writing Quiz Questions

If you write examination questions you should read this article by Tom Kuhlmann that gives some very basic but often overlooked advice on the subject.

Reading this article motivated me to looked through some of my old bookmarks and found this post from Cathy Moore that puts the "what not to do" in writing multiple choice quesitons in the context of multiple choice questions.

Very clever! (much more than I).

Do you write a lot of multiple choice questions?

Here is a brief primer on the advantages and disadvantages of multiple choice questions and how best to implement for effective assessment.

Learning Theory in a "Nutshell"

Creating Passionate Users, a blog that has been dormant for a year or so, still offers it's archive of highly entertaining and informative posts to anyone interested in creating effective (and not boring) educational materials.

The following post from a few years ago provides a very accessible presentation on how individuals learn, based on prevailing research.

Creating Passionate Users: Crash course in learning theory

Enjoy!

10 Facts About Learning

Donald Clarks Plan B blog is always a great and informative read. The following post does not disappoint.

In this post Clark offers a short list of scientifically proven learning facts (not flavor-of-the-month variety) that should be printed and kept close by as you develop your courses.

10 Facts About Learning

Make sure to review them often to help with retention.

I do wish there was a reference list included but some of the comments to include to sources for this list.

The eLearning Guild has made several archived webcast recordings from their online conference Converting Existing Course Content to e-Learning available for free to anyone who signs up as an associate member (minimum). There are some great presentations about how to go about converting live classroom materials for delivery over the web.

These web casts, delivered by Adobe Connect feature audio, slides and live screen action along with participant text chat. This provides the feel of attending the session live, of course, without the ability to comment or vote in the occasional polls.

Migrating from "Live" to Online Courses

Despite the title, this article has some good suggestions for modifying content for online delivery that was originally used for "live" face-to-face courses.