Reading Mr. Tessmer’s book on the creation of online tutorials was a real treat. I was very impressed with the applicablity of his knowledge and the humor sprinkled throughout made the text very read-able.
Some of the things that I found important within the reading are as follows:
1. Online learning needs to be designe differently than a web page (which really shouldn’t be thought of as a “page” either). We need to think of the visuable space as an environment, rather than something similer than a page. This is based upon our usage of the space, of which the online and screen based environments are new.
2. The importance of modularizing courses: Tessmer tell us that “if all of your content is bundled into a single module, many learners will plow through all the content until they’ve reached it’s end point, regardless of module length” (Tessmer, p15). It is important to moduleize per subject, to think about the natural breaks that will occure within the content.
3. Interactions are very important! Tessmer reminds us that the main difference between a text and a tutorial is the way that the tutorial engages the learner.
4. The difference between practice and test items, as well as their relationship to each other. Test items and practice items should match each other. He also reminds us that practice questions and test questions should be developed differently. Practice questions can have less distractors, they may be less carefully designed and allow learners to review content before they answer.
All in all I would have to say that this was a very helpful tutorial. I really liked the points and found the text to be very applicable.
