Adding Activities
9. Lesson
The lesson activity module enables a teacher to deliver content and/or practice activities in interesting and flexible ways. It is used in time bound courses with a start and end date which are supported by teachers or tutors.
You need to have the Course Manager or Teacher role to be able to add and configure lessons in OpenLearn Create, so will need to complete the Data Declaration form to get this role (please contact the OpenLearn create mailbox to request the form).
A teacher can use the lesson to create a linear set of content pages or instructional activities that offer a variety of paths or options for the learner. In either case, teachers can choose to increase engagement and ensure understanding by including a variety of questions, such as multiple choice, matching and short answer. Depending on the student’s choice of answer and how the teacher develops the lesson, students may progress to the next page, be taken back to a previous page or redirected down a different path entirely.
A lesson may be graded, with the grade recorded in the gradebook.
Lessons may be used
- For self-directed learning of a new topic
- For scenarios or simulations / decision-making exercises
- For differentiated revision, with different sets of revision questions depending upon answers given to initial questions
Step 1:
Give your lesson a name and a description – the description box is where you can explain the lesson activity to the learners. You can choose to display this description on the course page.
Step 2:
Confirm the appearance settings for the lesson:
- Linked media - A media file may be uploaded for use in the lesson. A 'Click here to view' link will then be displayed in a block called 'Linked media' on each page of the lesson.
- Progress bar (default is No) - if enabled, a bar is displayed at the bottom of lesson pages showing approximate percentage of completion.
Display ongoing score (default is No) - If enabled, each page will display the student's current points earned out of the total possible thus far.
- Display menu (default is No) - if enabled, a menu allowing users to navigate through the list of pages is displayed.
- Minimum grade to display menu (default is 0%) - This setting determines whether a student must obtain a certain grade before viewing the lesson menu. This forces the student to go through the entire lesson on their first attempt, then after obtaining the required grade they can use the menu for review.
- Slideshow (default is No) - If enabled, the lesson is displayed as a slideshow, with a fixed width and height.
- Maximum number of answers (default is 4) - This setting specifies the maximum number of answers that may be used in the lesson. If only true/false questions are used, it can be set to 2. The setting may be changed at any time, since it only affects what the teacher sees, not the data.
- Use default feedback (default is No) - If enabled, when a response is not found for a particular question, the default response of "That's the correct answer" or "That's the wrong answer" will be shown.
- Link to next activity - To provide a link at the end of the lesson to another activity in the course, select the activity from the dropdown list
Step 3:
You can set the time limits and period for the lesson in the availability settings.
Step 4:
In flow control you have the following settings:
- Allow student review (default is No) - If enabled, students can navigate through the lesson again from the start.
- Provide option to try a question again (default is No) - If enabled, when a question is answered incorrectly, the student is given the option to try it again for no point credit, or continue with the lesson.
- Maximum number of attempts (default is 1) - This setting specifies the maximum number of attempts allowed for each question. If answered incorrectly repeatedly, when the maximum is reached, the next page of the lesson is displayed.
- Action after correct answer (default is Normal – follow lesson path) - After answering a question correctly, there are 3 options for the following page:
- Normal - Follow lesson path
- Show an unseen page - Pages are shown in a random order with no page shown twice
- Show an unanswered page - Pages are shown in a random order, with pages containing unanswered questions shown again
- Number of pages to show (default is 1) - This setting specifies the number of pages shown in a lesson. It is only applicable for lessons with pages shown in a random order (when "Action after correct answer" is set to "Show an unseen page" or "Show an unanswered page"). If set to zero, then all pages are shown.
Step 5:
Set the grade criteria with the following options:
- Grade - Select the type of grading used for this activity. If "scale" is chosen, you can then choose the scale from the "scale" dropdown. If using "point" grading, you can then enter the maximum grade available for this activity.
- Grade category - This setting controls the category in which this activity's grades are placed in the gradebook.
- Grade to pass - This setting determines the minimum grade required to pass. The value is used in activity and course completion, and in the gradebook, where pass grades are highlighted in green and fail grades in red.
- Practice lesson (default is No) - A practice lesson does not appear in the gradebook.
- Custom scoring (default is Yes) - If enabled, then each answer may be given a numerical point value (positive or negative).
- Re-takes allowed (default is No) - If enabled, students can attempt the lesson more than once.
- Handling of re-takes (default is use mean) - If re-takes are allowed, this setting specifies whether the grade for the lesson is the mean or maximum of all attempts.
- Minimum number of questions (default is 0) - This setting specifies the minimum number of questions that will be used to calculate a grade for the activity.
Step 6:
You probably will not need to touch the Common module settings unless you are using groups.
You can ignore Restrict access unless you need to add a restriction.
Step 7:
Save and display
The Edit screen for the lesson will appear with the prompt ‘what would you like to do first?
The following options are given:
- Import questions
- Add a content page
- Add a cluster
- Add a question page
Import questions allows you to import a file of questions. You can upload a file of any of the following formats:
- Aiken format
- Blackboard
- Embedded answers (Cloze)
- Examview
- Gift format
- Missing word format
- Moodle XML format
- WebCT format
Add a content page has the following settings:
Page title, page contents
Arrange content buttons horizontally (default is checked)
Display in menu? (default is checked)
Content 1
- Description
- Jump (default this page) – other options are next page, previous page, end of lesson, unseen question within a content page, random question within a content page, random content page
Content 2
Content 3 etc
Add a cluster asks you to give the cluster a page title and page contents, it also has the jump options.
Add a question page will ask you to select a question type from a drop down list with the following options: Multichoice, essay, matching, numerical, short answer, true/false
Each of these options has a set up page, for example multichoice (which is the default) asks for a page title, page contents, multiple-answer (default unchecked), answer 1 (with answer and response boxes, jump and score), answer 2, answer 3 and answer 4. Each answer (for questions) or description (for content pages) has a corresponding jump. The jump can be relative, such as this page or next page, or absolute, specifying any one of the pages in the lesson.