Unit 3. Designing a Framework for Your Course
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A well-designed framework for your IMI
is like a well-organized filing system. Folders are neatly arranged in
a specific order. You (or anyone else) can find files easily. It's easier
to maintain, and it looks neat and tidy.
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In this unit, we present AFIADL's standard text
breakdowns, and we explain the logic of our naming and
numbering systems. |
Sometimes an Instructional Technology (IT) unit
or a contractor will develop your courseware. No matter who designs and
develops your courseware, you must ensure compliance with Air Force and
AFIADL guidelines and standards. AFIADL is a "publishing house,"
and it's important that AFIADL's course materials have a similar look
and "feel." We allow exceptions, of course, but they should
be agreed upon ahead of time in a memorandum of understanding (MOU).
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Your final
product reflects the quality of your first efforts in
organizing your material. You can write from a
well-organized outline more easily and quickly than from
a poorly organized one.
Spend extra time organizing the material and you save time in the end.
More importantly, you produce a better course.
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How should you pick a presentation pattern? In
practice, you seldom use only one pattern; you combine
two or more of them—space and time, for example.
They can overlap easily. Many subjects seem to choose
their own patterns. Most discussions of the first few
seconds of an atomic bomb explosion seem to fall
naturally into the time pattern, but most discussions of
bomb damage fall into cause and effect or, perhaps,
division presentation.
Always pick a pattern (or combination of patterns)
that presents your ideas clearly and helps the student
satisfy the requirements of the lesson objective. Here
are a few organizational patterns to give you some ideas.
Lead your students into a subject carefully, moving
from easy ideas to hard ones. In that way, students can
absorb simple ideas before you throw tough ones at them.
In this organizational pattern, you start with what
your students know and build your discussions on that
base. By relating what students already know to what
they're learning, you help them associate memories with
something else—an essential part of the learning
process. One way to use this device is to relate job
situations students may have experienced to the new
material you're teaching.
Review this table when you start to organize your
material.
To help students organize their thoughts,
organize your own thoughts and develop a structure by
using:
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Menus |
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Titles and headings |
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Bullets and lists |
This is a very important organizational, as well as
navigational, element. Menus provide an anchor—a
place where students can go if they get lost. Menus must
contain elements down to the lesson (or topical
statement) level, including lesson number. This is
required because students receive a postcard with lesson
numbers of test questions missed on a course exam.
These elements tell students what lies under them. They also provide a schema
of organizational levels. For instance, you should always display a topic or
heading at the top of each screen to orient students and to remind students
who have fallen asleep where they are.
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Bullets are used for
emphasis and as advance organizers (a preview of coming
attractions). They also can be used to list short items
on the screen. You are free to use bullets as much as you
want. Keep them small in size. |
1.
2.
3.
4.
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Numbers on the screen don't seem to have the same impact as bullets.
However, there are times when you want students to do something in order,
like a set of procedures, so numbers would be appropriate. Numbers also
can be useful if the screen is too small for the amount of information
you need to impart. In that case, you could say, "There are five
types of ..." You could list
1 through 3 on the first screen, and 4 and 5 on the next.
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Apollo I (NASA Photo) |
Like NASA
(National Aeronautical and Space Administration), we too
need a system to name and number our
"missions"—the 400 plus courses we publish
and manage for you. Currently, we have three types of
courses (career development, specialized, and
professional military education courses), each with an
average of 3 to 4 volumes or disks. Keeping track of all
those volumes and disks—not to mention the latest
version and which course exam goes with which
course—is not an easy task. So, we ask that you
follow our formatting standards. |
AFIADL's formatting standards for multimedia career development courses (CDC)
and specialized courses (SC) are noted in the chart.
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Element
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Description
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| Table of contents (TOC) or Menu |
List of major items on a disk or website. Your TOC or menu(s) should
go down to the lesson level.
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| Lesson |
Material under a numbered instructional
objective or topical statement. |
| Lesson objective or topical statement (TS)
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Tells students what they should
learn in the lesson. Must appear at the start of the lesson. Use AFIADL's
numbering system for lessons (see below). |
| Interactive questions and feedback |
Questions with feedback that are
scattered throughout a lesson. Should have at least two (or the lesson
is too short!). These act as self-test questions, helping students assess
their own learning. |
| Review exercise |
An "open-book" teaching exercise made up of multiple-choice
questions to sample the information in a course. It is presented in
lesson sequence. An answer key is published separately. AFIADL folks
will develop this exercise for you if you submit a separate itempool.
If you are preparing full IMI, be sure to coordinate this effort with
the Blended Learning (BL) Team by e-mail: afiadl.ait@maxwell.af.mil.
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| Course exam (CE) |
Normally paper-based. Developed
by AFIADL. |
To satisfy our computerized system conventions, you must conform to our numbering
guidelines for course number (with edit code) and lesson numbers. If you wish
to include a graphic or table in your review exercise or CE, you must follow
our numbering system for that, too (which we talk about later).
In order to distinguish between paper-based (including hybrid) courses and
full electronic courses for CDCs, PME, and specialized courses, we devised an
identification system. The chart below shows your 5-digit course number with
a suffix, if needed, that identifies the medium of your course. For now, most
of you will fall in the first category. For example, if you have only one 5-level
course, it would be just the 5-digit alphanumeric (or "slick"). If
you have multiple courses for each level, your first course would be 3E151A,
your second course would be 3E151B, and so on.
| Course Medium |
Designated Letter(s)* |
Example |
| Paper or Hybrid** |
"Slick," A, B, C, etc. |
3E151, 3E151A, 3E151B, 3E151C |
| Full Electronic (CD, DVD, or network-centric) |
M, N, O, etc. |
4B051M, 4B051N, 4B051O |
*These letters must be used in order, per course.
**Hybrid indicates the course consists mainly of paper, with
multimedia enhancements
(normally on a CD-ROM).
The first time you prepare an IMI course, use Edit Code 01. If you revise
that course, it becomes Edit Code 02. (Of course, you can assign your own version
of a course, to help you keep track of your internal changes to a disk or course.)
We need the edit code for our tracking system.
If your course requires more than one disk, number them Disk 1 of 3, Disk 2
of 3, etc. Don't put two or more courses on a single disk; use one disk even
if the course is small.
Here’s what AFIADL requires for numbering a
lesson: Three numerical digits
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Disk
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Lessons
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If you are preparing full IMI, assign each lesson
a three-digit number, starting with 101.
If your course goes beyond lesson number 999,
you should seriously think about splitting your course into two courses.
Be especially careful to number precisely in sequence within each volume.
The reason we need this numbering sequence is that the review exercise
and CE are based on this numbering system.
What
do you do if your authoring system forces you to use a
different numbering system for lessons, and you have
approval to use that authoring system in your MOU?
Include a correlation sheet to match the auto set lesson
numbers with AFIADL’s required three-digit numbers.
You can put this information on the disk or you can
include a separate piece of paper for your students.
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1
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101 - 199
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2
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201 - 299
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3
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301 - 399
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4
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401 - 499
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5
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501 - 599
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6
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601 - 699
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7
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701 - 799
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8
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801 - 899
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9
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901 - 999
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Talk to the BL Team at AFIADL if you're using legacy software that does not
follow our 3-digit format.
You don't need to number interactive questions that are embedded in
the course.
Remember that AFIADL develops the review exercise and a CE from your itempool
(U0.doc file). If you want us to include a graphic or table in a review exercise
or CE, submit the graphic or table on a floppy disk. Use the file name T-1,
T-2, etc. in sequence for each graphic or table in a course (and
be sure to label each floppy disk correctly). Then, in the U0.doc file, refer
to the graphic/table you want to go with that question.
For
example, a question in the U0.doc might look like this:
Refer to figure T-1. What is the procedure
to…
You also may include a legend (identifying name) under
each graphic or table.
Each question that corresponds to a graphic or table
must be so marked. Of course, you can have more than one
question refer to a single graphic—just mark each
question.
It's no secret that IMI creates hundreds,
even thousands, of files. Without a system to name and/or
number these files, you'll create a monster. Therefore,
you need a directory structure to help organize and
maintain your course.
Example:
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Here's the start of a basic directory structure for course 0C300. Note that
in our example, disk 1 has folders for each disk, and within each disk are folders
for each module, and within each module are folders for audio, images, lessons,
and video. |
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