ARCHIVED: Oncourse Lessons (beta): Overview

What it does

Lessons (beta) is a lesson builder tool that allows instructors to publish and organize learning material to guide students through the learning process. The tool provides a structure to help instructors build modules and add content to them. It also provides a navigation structure to guide students through the modules in a clear, logical way.

Use cases include:

• Online courses, which often want to structure material by unit or week
• Online training, which needs to define sequences of material
• Online certification, which needs to require certain items to be done, and sometimes to limit access until prerequisites are met

Key concepts

Top-level pages and subpages: A site may contain as many top-level pages as desired, which will appear as links in the menubar (although you can hide a top-level page until a specific release date). For example, each unit of a course might be represented by a top-level page. Each top-level page may have subpages to present additional content or activities.

Integration with other tools: The Lessons (beta) tool can incorporate activities from other tools, such as Assignments, Tests & Surveys, and Forums.

Required items: Instructors can make items required, and can block access from later items until after students have completed certain required items. For tests and assignments, instructors can specify a minimum score.

Group awareness: If instructors specify one or more groups or sections for a particular item, students who are not in the specified groups or sections won't see the item.

Things to consider

• If you make an item required in the Lessons (beta) tool, and its availability is restricted by date (e.g., a test has a retract date, or an assignment is set not to accept submissions after the due date), students who miss the deadline may be unable to make further progress in the course.
• You can create branched learning activities, which have students proceed to different pages depending upon their choices. For instance, you might add a question to a Lessons page (see ARCHIVED: Adding text to a page in Lessons (beta)), and below the question, add multiple links to subpages, each associated with a different answer (see ARCHIVED: Adding, editing, or removing pages or subpages in Lessons (beta)).
• If you remove the Lessons tool from your site and then add it back in (see ARCHIVED: Adding, removing, hiding, or reordering tools), any material you added will be gone, and you'll have to recreate your Lessons pages manually.

Help documentation

For help documentation about the Lessons tool, see ARCHIVED: Lessons (beta).