Organise content to take account of the transition to an online environment

There is a general design issue here in the tendency towards 'shovel ware' - content intended for traditional use, such as face to face lectures, is merely uploaded for online use without adaptation. The result is large amounts of scrollable text which is not 'chunked' for manageability.

Moving to an online medium requires a different approach to the teaching and learning methods. It provides the opportunity to move from teacher centred approaches to learner centred approaches. More guidance on the development of learner centred approaches can be found in the EDTeC document 'Quality Teaching Principles and Guidelines' available online at http://www.edtec.unsw.edu.au/. Changing the way information, material and learning is approached to encourage active, co-operative learning can give greater opportunities for people with disabilities, but is also likely to benefit everyone. Consistent with EDTeC's teaching quality guidelines, to improve the inclusivity of an online course:

• Consider changing from delivery of lecture notes to presenting an activity for students work on, use the as support material, and provide other resources.>
• When presenting notes, try to ensure that the content of each section fits into a single screen to avoid the need for scrolling. If the document is long, it can be broken into subsections with links provided to each section and back to the top of the document.
• Where documents are long and can't be shortened, provide hyperlinks at the top of the document (as an index or contents list) so that the user can go straight to the required section. Provide a link from each section back to the index, or have the index visible at all levels of the document.

For assistance with learner centred design, seek the advice of an Instructional Designer at EDTeC.

This checkpoint refers to W3C Guideline 14: Ensure that documents are clear and simple.

Use the features provided by WebCT to organise and structure your course content

The organisation of a course can be significantly improved and easier to access by using some of the features of WebCT to structure the content, in particular:

• Create an icon 'Course Content/Related Materials' and store all the actual material in here including, Syllabus, Tutorials/Activities/Workshops/ Lectures/ Links other resources.>
• Use the 'Syllabus' tool to display the general information about the course. This tool enables the presentation of information in smaller sections.
• Provide clear and consistent navigation mechanisms. Include in the Course Home Page any links that need to be accessed on a regular basis e.g. Announcements which needs to be checked regularly.
• The WebCT interface can be difficult for students using screen readers because of the frame format used. To overcome this, ensure that all navigation options are available from within the organiser pages (i.e. the main window) and advise those using screen readers to select the 'hide navigation' option.
• As Internet Explorer (IE) copes more efficiently with screen readers than Netscape, advise students using screen readers to view their course in IE.

This checkpoint refers to W3C Guideline 12: Provide context and orientation information,
and Guideline 14: Ensure that documents are clear and simple.