Blogs

By Julianne Morgan

What’s This Series About?

I love the Lessons tool. Few things satisfy my little perfectionist* heart as much as a well-organized, aesthetically pleasing, easily navigable Lessons tool. I spend all day in Isidore and Lessons, and while there is no one right way to do things . . . there are better ways and there are worse ways.

My recommendation to anyone is to consult with instructional designers in the Center for Online Learning on how best to organize your course materials within Isidore. It may be that your course organization is perfect already - but it may be that we would have a few suggestions to help improve yours and your students’ experience. We can help you implement any changes we think are worth making.

For this series of “Love of Lessons” posts, though, my goal is not to show alllllll the myriad ways in which you could organize your content. My main goal of this series is to expose and explain features in Lessons that folks may not know how to use.

The first post of this series is about expandable and collapsible sections.

What Are Expandable/Collapsible Sections?

Within a Lessons page, you can add section breaks. You can make those section breaks expandable and collapsible.

Why Use Expandable/Collapsible Sections?

Easy - to reduce students' cognitive load. "Students learn new material better and can remember it longer when they receive it in chunks that reduce the number of pieces of new information by collapsing them into categories or logical groups" (Nilson and Goodson, Online Teaching at Its Best, p. 98).

While you may not be delivering actual content in your instructions and resources within Lessons, the principle of reducing information into logical chunks still applies.  

Below is a 4-minute example video of a Lessons page that has a lot going on in it, and then demonstrating how I re-organize the page with expandable sections. 

Expandable/Collapsible Sections Best Practices

According to me. Take 'em or leave 'em and do what makes sense for your class. 

1. Don't use expandable/collapsible sections if you don't have enough content to merit their use. This may apply to almost everyone reading this, seriously. While I would still recommend grouping related files, Assignment links, text instructions, etc. in logical, sequenced ways in Isidore, you may not need to use the section breaks to do this. Many instructors teaching face-to-face courses do not need to add supplemental information about why the assignment matters for the course, how it connects to prior learning, stories from professional expertise, detailed instructions, or other context that enhances the online learning experience -- so therefore you may never need to use these section breaks. 
   
   
2. I've mentioned this one, twice, thrice, but seriously - consult with your friendly instructional designers. You can simply email onlinelearning@udayton.edu for help, or you can also submit a Course Review Request where we will take an overall look at your course site and provide feedback and help on making any changes we would recommend.
   
   
3. Super personal preference, but be deliberate and consistent in what you name your section headers. The example in the video had the following section titles:
   1. Task 1: Watch Introduction Video
   2. Task 2: Read Chapter 1
   3. Task 3: Watch Crash Course
   4. Task 4: Review Final Project Instructions
   5. Task 5: Complete Chapter 1 Quiz
      
      I like these titles because they feel very action-oriented. I tell them the order they should complete the tasks by saying Task 1, Task 2, etc., and then I start each section with an actionable verb. There are other perfectly valid ways to title your sections.
4. Sequence sections in the order students should do the tasks. Don't put Chapter 1 Quiz first if they have to read the textbook and watch a lecture video before they should take the quiz. 
   
   
5. I don't recommend splitting everything out into its own individual task. While my example had "Read Chapter 1" as a section, I would typically organize ALL my readings into a single task. If I wanted students to do a pre-reading, then an activity, then a post-reading, I would perhaps consider splitting those items into their own individual tasks. However, I might also consider joining them all into ONE task and calling it: "Task 2: Complete Readings and Thought Activity" or something like that. 
   
   
6. Expandable/Collapsible sections have use cases other than just splitting instructions/files/resources for weekly tasks into discrete segments. Some instructors put all their course content on a single Lessons page, then use the expandable sections for each week of the course. Some instructors use the Lessons page to split the most important content of their Syllabus into easily digestible sections. Some instructors split their courses into expandable units with sub-pages of Lessons for each module. 
   
   
7. Save clicks! In the demo video above, I showed you how to manually add the section breaks. I think this is important for folks to know how to do if they are ever going to use section breaks, but the time-saving way to use expandable/collapsible sections is to use our Add Layouts feature where you can set up a bunch of section breaks in bulk. 
   
   

Well, that's all I have to say about expandable/collapsible sections. Stay tuned for the next post in this Love of Lessons series! Up next: maybe Checklists? maybe Questions? We shall see!

*Isidore perfectionist. Not a writing perfectionist, clearly.