Draft 1, Begun: 10.08.15, As of: 10.09.08
There are at least two ways (or dimensions), and several ways, in which to create educationally useful variability with out too much additional trouble or burden in the authoring activities required to produce materials. This PI believes that well constructed and presented "variability" of study materials and "experiences" can lead to much better educational outcomes (which is an hypothesis yet to be proved).
- Create a list of "related skills, terms, and concepts" for a student to study in a single study session or in a succession of study sessions for a particular lesson or for an agreed-upon, very discrete set of learning objectives in 1-3 or a few more study sessions on that subject.
- Create a ranked list (i.e. the students' likely most to least interesting list) of Internet (and/or of your institution's Intra-net) study materials which would satisfy, say, 68% (1 sigma) of the statistical cross-section of interests of your students in that class studying that lesson or lesson sequence to achieve the pre-determined learning objectives.
- Create 2, 3 or more versions of your primary learning materials, e.g: {simple, harder} or {beginner, least experienced student; intermediate student with some previous experience; advanced student with a great deal of previous experience, also a faster more insightful learner, etc.}.
If you plan to be able to create two or more versions of your learning materials, where each version is at a different "level of learning difficulty", here are some tips and goals to consider planning for in order to do so in addition to your normal composition and editing:
- Save your notes and drafts "in a more organized", easier to find way; perhaps use sub-directories on your personal or office "authoring" computer where each is named by the anticipated "level of difficulty" of the material there-in.
- Create a list of the note file names, and the draft file names of materials that are "works in progress, also note their subject or topic, and level of difficulty in a separate computer file (e.g. in a spread-sheet or in a simple database table).
- Cross-reference in a separate computer file (or in a spread-sheet or simple database table) these file names by "the topic" and "the anticipated degree of difficulty" of the material.
- Consider / anticipate that in the future there may be Internet and educational web site software "tools" or "features" which will assess your student's subjective experience of the "difficulty" of the learning materials and the statistical summary of all your student's self-ratings of the same study material will be available to you. With the statistical summary information you will be able to compare your "anticipated levels / degrees of difficulty" of the 2-3+ levels of material with the students' expressed experiences of them and adjust your ratings of them accordingly, if not also adjust the materials as well.
Note to self: THIS_LIST_WILL_NEED_MUCH_MORE_WORK_ASAP_TO_GET_EDUCATORS_THINKING_ABOUT_THE_PROBLEM
Note to self: THIS_IS_WHAT_AN_ONLINE_AUTHORING_CMS_OUGHT_TO_DO_FOR_AUTHORS