Course Road Maps

 

While the syllabus and announcements are very helpful to students working through your ETUDES-NG course, you might consider an additional support. A printable Course Road Map will help students get a step-by-step tour through the different activities they have to complete and help them track their own progress.

 

Kelly Kirk, in the August 17, 2007 issue of the E-learning Guild's Learning Solutions e-Magazine describes her process. Logging in as a student, she notes each step for a given task. She asks someone else to test her instructions and adjusts the directions so the user does the task correctly. Finally, she creates a printable document for students to download that includes these task instructions next to the assignment due dates and grading criteria.

 

This is a useful tool for students as they can use the printed page as a checklist for working their way through the course, and refer back to how to accomplish less frequent activities within the course environment. It also reduces the amount of directing required later in the course. You can tell students to access a lecture or resource without reiterating all the instructions each time.

 

Why Bother?

 

Common observations by instructors

 

1. Students tend not to read the syllabus
2. The student help modules are great but the information is dense and people tend to just ask instead of going back through them for how-to information
3. Adult learners want to know what they have to DO in the course up front
4. ETUDES-NG doesn't like multiple windows open, so switching back and forth between how-to and an assignment for instance creates a lot of extra mouse clicks to save drafts, etc. 

 

The printable course road map

 

• organizes information by what the student is focused on
• pares down the syllabus to need-to-know-right-now info
• tasks are with the assignments that require them, so students feel progress is obvious.
• lets the student have a reference material while staying in the task that's going on

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2007

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