Tips for Quality Learning Materials

Tips for Quality Learning Materials

What about motivation? One of the most serious, recurrent criticisms of teaching material is that it is often insufferably dull and stupidly bland! We've all experienced it as students, and we know how mind-numbing it can be! But it does not have to be so! As long as it is not a significant distraction from the learning task, authors should include humorous, shocking, titillating, mysterious, profound, sad, happy, emotionally engaging content in all learning materials. And here's why. Students are bombarded with over-stimulation of all the senses, all day; every day. Such students are easily bored and simply tune-out when the learning material is mindless. Interesting, engaging, successful teaching materials must, very simply, capture and hold a student's interest. Make no mistake, it is very hard work to create such materials! But do it we must!

All learning materials are based upon primary information which has been processed and organized to help the learner understand something more quickly and more thoroughly than he would have, working from the primary source alone. The text of Shakespeare's complete works is enormous and complex, but a concordance of his complete works helps the student digest that text in bite-sized pieces. Marginal or footnote annotation helps the student understand obscure parts of the primary text immediately and associate them with illuminating details described in the notes. This pedagogical "apparatus" is both a distraction and an aid, often detracting from the direct experience of the primary source. But the alternative for the novice is a much longer learning curve, with the possibility of missed insights. By contrast, unguided learning is what we call research and scholarship, and it is usually reserved for the advanced student with a larger, existing information base.

Because of the human mind's capacity for organizing and storing knowledge efficiently and indelibly, teachers must always be alert to simplifying and structuring information where necessary in order to help the student learn. Above all, learning materials must take the needs of the learner into account. The author of learning materials must anticipate the student's starting point with reasonable accuracy, and each successive step thereafter, until the student has learned. The Socratic dialog seeks to reduce the complex learning task to a step at the time. But even this venerable method of instruction, of apparently self-directed inquiry, does not work without a commonly held information base, a common starting point for the inquiry. The teacher must ask just the right question at each measured step to help the student establish the logical connections between the successive steps of the inquiry

Even where the student is learning a performance skill, in which physical performance of a learning task is primary, the conscious mind almost always has a role to play. Music, dance, sports, and language teachers are not content to merely "model" performance of the skill, expecting the student to simply "get it". The student must practice the skill to train the non-intellectual parts of the nervous system. But these teachers also talk about the performance of the skill as a learning aid.

The various parts of ScottNet's^® MakeMeSmart^™ interactive online multimedia tutorial platform facilitate the construction and administration of carefully designed teaching materials for presentation, practice, and evaluation. As teachers find that their materials are working, they keep them available for reuse, always presenting their best work to their students. Where they discover elements in their own work that do not serve students well, they can quickly improve and renew their teaching material to make it as effective as humanly possible. When the teacher sees the results of student performance on exercises and quizzes, the quality of the teaching/testing material will become apparent immediately. Within our program this can all be done "on-the-fly" and made available to students instantaneously, even from a classroom computer. Why would any author ever again want to write for a static print medium when he can now create, correct, and improve learning materials continuously, in real time. Authoring just doesn't get any better than this!

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