Designing Web-Based Training: How to Teach Anyone Anything Anywhere Anytime

5.3. DESIGN YOUR OWN LEARNING SEQUENCES

You can design a lot of courses using only common lesson structures presented earlier in this chapter. But a familiarity with the principles of combining, linking, and sequencing pages to shape learning experiences qualifies you to do more. You can then design lessons and courses that exactly fit the needs of your learners. This section discusses some of the principles for structuring learning sequences.

5.3.1. Design an orderly organization

The lack of architectural discipline leads to ill-structured WBT lessons and courses, which in turn lead to confused, disoriented, and frustrated learners. Unless a course is clearly and logically organized, learners may feel overwhelmed or lost. Such feelings of disorientation can seriously reduce their ability to learn [83].

[Learners] prefer clearly defined learning outcomes, or tasks, and recommended sequencing, from which they can orient themselves at any time [91].

Fairly extensive research has established the dangers of disorientation for those navigating complexly linked hypertext structures [92].

Here is an example without clear organization. This lesson appears disorganized with no clear learning path and no guidance for selecting paths and topics.

The lesson is not as disorganized as this diagram makes it appear. But the learner cannot know this.

Here is another version of the same ...