Creating the Study Guide
   

This section contains the "nuts-n-bolts" information about writing a course study guide, including descriptions of the various standard parts of a study guide and content and design hints.
   
 

The Introduction to Your Study Guide
    You will need to develop an introduction to your correspondence course to provide students with essential information. In addition to including information such as texts, supplies, course papers or projects, and examinations, it should provide an overview of the entire course, treating both the content and scope. This is the type of information often presented in the classroom in the first few class sessions, and you might consider discussing how this course fits into the curriculum and how it might relate to students' overall education. Often, motivational statements of encouragement and hints on how to study by correspondence assist the adult learner who may not have studied formally for several years. Below are some elements which are normally included in the introduction to a study guide:
   
  • The introductory statement: "This study guide contains the general instructions and lessons for (Department Course No.) (Course Title). General instructions for submitting lessons are given on pages iv-vi. Further information is given in the sections below."
  • Prerequisites: These include both those which are recognized by the University and any other skills or background which students will need to succeed in your course.
  • A brief biographical sketch to give students some background about you, the author of their study guide and their tutor at a distance.
  • A statement of course goals or objectives to provide a framework for the course and to assist students in preparing for examinations.
  • A list of textbooks and required supplies: Please list full bibliographic information for all required and supplemental texts (author, title, edition if other than first, publisher, date). Please be specific for any other required supplies, including where they might be purchased. If necessary, we can work with EdMap to create packets of supplies.
  • A statement of grading standards. In addition to standards, please indicate the relative weight of each component of the course. This may be your own weighting or there may be a uniform policy in your department. One example might be 30% for average of all lesson assignments, 30% for midcourse examination, and 40% for final examination. Also indicate if you assign plus or minus grades, especially when indicating final course grades.
  • A description of your examinations: This may be brief, and more specific information given on the lesson page just prior to the examination application. Please state what materials may be used on examinations: graphs, charts, hand-held calculators, dictionaries, etc.
  • Information about course papers or projects, if included in your course.
  • Special instructions: If you require assignments to be typed/keyboarded, you must state that; likewise, if you wish to deviate from the general instructions for submitting lessons which are prepared by the IDLP office.
  • Time frame for course completion: Normal procedures for Independent and Distance Learning limit students to submitting one lesson at a time, in order to allow maximum feedback from you. Especially if they are under a tight deadline to complete the course, students may request to submit multiple lessons. It is entirely your choice to allow multiple lesson submission. If you allow students to submit more than one lesson at a time, this information should be stated in the introduction. In any case, students are not permitted to submit more than 3 lessons simultaneously.
    Some sample introductions and the pages of general instructions which appear in every study guide are included in the appendix to this manual.
 
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  Developing Lessons
    Dividing the Course into Lessons
      After you have written the introduction to the course, it is time to consider dividing the body of the course into discrete units, which we call lessons. A lesson covers a specific unit of content and concludes with a submitted assignment. One useful way to think of any course is in terms of weeks of work, that is, each lesson equates to one week of classroom work. The resulting course will have twelve or thirteen lessons–ten regular lessons plus two or three examinations (or two examinations and a course project or paper). Another method of creating lessons is by chapters or units in the textbook. Through research on course completion and through experience, we have found that the most successful model is no more than four lessons per quarter hour of credit. This includes examinations, course papers, and projects. Therefore, a three quarter-hour course would normally consist of twelve lessons maximum; a five quarter-hour course would have no more than twenty lessons. Very many or very few lessons decreases the probability of students completing the course. Each lesson in the study guide should have a descriptive title.
      The IDLP office uses a computerized student recordkeeping system to keep track of each student's progress through each course in which he or she is enrolled. The system also alerts the staff when a student has completed and has received a grade for all lessons prior to a supervised examination.
      This system creates some simple constraints which you need to take into account when you divide your course material into lessons.
     
1.
 All lessons which are numbered must have submitted assignments, and submitted assignments must be numbered consecutively. In other words, you cannot have Lesson #1 and #2 with no submitted assignment, then have a lesson numbered 3 with an assignment. If this is a problem for your course, you may have lesson numbers and subsections, for example, Lesson 1, Part A, Part B, and then Lesson 1 Writing Assignment. When the student submits the assignment, the lesson cover form will be marked Lesson 1, even though the student has worked through two reading assignments and two discussion sections in the study guide.
     
2.
 All examinations and special projects, papers, etc., must have lesson numbers.
      If you anticipate any difficulty in dividing your course into lessons, or find the system confusing, please call or visit the IDLP office and talk to one of the instructional design specialists.
      After you have divided your course into lessons, please write a Table of Contents, which should be submitted to the instructional materials staff along with your course introduction and a draft of the first lesson.
      The first lesson of the course is an extremely important element. Research indicates that students who submit the first lesson normally complete the course. If possible, it is a good idea to make the first lesson a little shorter than the others so that students may quickly begin the process of reading, writing, and submitting an assignment.
   
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    Lesson Format
      Reading Assignments: Excluding lessons which are examinations, papers, or projects, every lesson should have a reading assignment. Depending upon the nature of your text and other reading materials, you can divide the reading about equally among the lessons, or you may wish to begin with shorter assignments in the first few lessons and longer assignments toward the end of the course. The reading assignments may contain both required and optional materials. All required reading must be contained in the course text(s) or reprinted in the study guide; optional reading may be left for students to find.
      Lesson Objectives: Performance objectives should be developed for each lesson. Three to six objectives per lesson is a good number, and they should correspond to the knowledge you expect students to demonstrate in the writing assignments. These objectives may also serve an organizing function for the lesson. (The appendix to this manual has helpful suggestions and examples for writing lesson objectives.)
      Discussion or Background Section: This section of the lesson is most important because it replaces the lecture or student-instructor discussion normally provided in the classroom. Elements you may wish to include in this section are a summary or elaboration of the reading material, clarification of difficult concepts, examples of problems or cases, points where you disagree with the text author, or answers to questions which are often raised by students in the classroom.
      If your discussion section is particularly long, it is a good practice to divide it with subheadings. The performance objectives could be the framework for dividing these sections.
      The writing style you use in the discussion section of each lesson is a critical communication element in your course. The student learning at a distance needs to have a sense of "personality," a feeling that there is a live human being mediating between him or her and the course content. Even if your normal classroom presentation is a formal lecture, students still participate in the nonverbal communication that is inherent in face-to-face teaching. Distance students do not have that communication, but it can be partially conveyed by the tone and choice of language in this part of the lesson.
      Instructors who are writing and teaching a correspondence course for the first time sometimes approach the study guide as if they were writing a journal article or presentation for their peers. This style of writing often leaves the students who read it feeling as if they should already understand, rather than that they are on the way to understanding. A device we have found helpful for instructors in "switching gears" is to have them think of the discussion in the study guide as a conversation, or as a letter, which says to the student, "This is the most important part of the reading material," or "This part is where students sometimes have difficulty," or "I know from my experience in the classroom that students often ask questions about this." It is also helpful to use examples, or analogies from familiar experiences, or make connections to the worlds of employment and home that most adult students share.
      This does not mean that we expect you to sacrifice the academic rigor of your course, but a student who has no one to ask questions of or no sense that anyone else has problems in understanding will be greatly reassured if you, as the course instructor, say, "You may find this concept (or whatever) difficult, but if you do this, it may help you."
      Writing Assignment: The quality of assignment questions you develop for each lesson is vital to the success of the students. You will want questions, whether objective, essay, or problem-solving (or a mix), which will direct the students' learning. Having already developed performance objectives for the lesson, you will find it easier to develop questions which measure the desired mastery of the material as you have stated it in the objectives.
      E-Mail Lesson Service. We are encouraging instructors to consider e-mail as an option for receiving and returning lesson assignments. Because of the wide range of communication services and computer equipment, we have tried to create a “plain vanilla” system that will accommodate most users. However, that means we have to sacrifice some of the features of high-level e-mail systems. Some considerations in creating writing assignments that can be e-mailed are:
     
  • Students need to put all of their assignment within the body of the e-mail message; no attachments.
  • Formatting options are limited, so symbols, formulas, etc., are a problem. Math, science, statistics, and some business and social sciences courses may not be able to use e-mail lesson submission.
  • Some courses may be “hybrid,” with some or most assignments submitted by e-mail, while others, especially course projects or papers, submitted by fax or postal mail.
      Copies of the information about e-mail lesson service for both students and instructors are provided in the appendix of standard forms at the end of this manual.
      In addition to submitted assignments for evaluation and grading, you might also wish to develop self-study questions of a more general nature. Another teaching device that assists distance students is self-check questions for which you provide answers in an appendix to the study guide. The device allows students to know immediately if they are assimilating key concepts.
   
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    Instructional Media
      Various instructional media can be incorporated into correspondence courses to enhance the learning process. We do encourage you to use visual or auditory supplements to your study guide to provide students with a variety of channels to accommodate a variety of learning styles. Visual elements such as diagrams, simple line drawings, maps, charts, and graphs are relatively easy to incorporate into the printed study guide. Audio cassette or videotape recordings are other media which have been successfully used in our courses.
      We can use photographic images (prints and slides, both color and black-and-white) and computerized instructional materials as supplements to our traditional print-based courses. Web-based resources are encouraged if they are appropriate to your subject. We suggest that you chose sites that are likely to be stable over time. If you are interested in using nonprint materials with your course, please offer your suggestions when you begin to work on the course.
     
    Typescript
      We ask that you submit material in the following form:
     
  • Typed, double-spaced, one side of page only;
  • 8 1/2 x 11" paper (oversized sheets are often damaged because our files cannot accommodate them);
  • If you must hand-write your course materials, please write as legibly as possible and use space generously, on one side of the page only.
      Most course authors will prepare their course materials on computer disk. If you use a Windows PC and any standard word-processing program, or Macintosh hardware and either MacWrite or Microsoft Word, the course materials can be edited directly on disk.
     
  • Please create your manuscript in a simple text format; using page-making or elaborate design programs creates "translation" problems. Indicate major and secondary headings with all caps or boldfaced type.
  • If you use non-standard hardware or software, please provide us with a printed copy, as well as a disk.
  • Please use a high quality dot-matrix (with a good ribbon), ink-jet, or laser printer. Print the manuscript double-spaced.
  • You may e-mail your course materials as attachments. Divide the materials into files for each lesson and save them as .rtf files. This format is recognized by most word- or page-processing software.
     
    Editorial/Production Service
      When we receive your complete typescript, we will evaluate it. If all materials have been completed as agreed to in the Memorandum of Agreement, a requisition will be processed to pay you 80 percent of the total stipend agreed to in the memorandum. An instructional design specialist/editor (referred to hereafter as the “editor”) will be assigned to your course who may wish to work closely with you, depending on the nature of your course. Once your course has been edited, it will be typed and/or formatted by one of our manuscript specialists and proofread by the editor. (The editing and production process is on a first in, first out basis. Depending upon our workload, it may be several months before your course materials are ready for you to proofread, although the usual time for the process is 6-8 weeks.) A photocopy of the formatted course will then be sent to you for your proofreading and for any minor modifications you may wish to make. This is a very important step, since no changes can be made after the study guide is printed.
     
    Departmental Evaluation
      When we receive your corrected course back from you, it will be printed and bound. We will also release the remaining 20 percent of the development stipend for payment. A copy of the finished course will be sent to your department chairperson for final departmental approval. This approval process is required to ensure that the content of your course approximates as much as possible the content of the course as it is taught on campus. Most department chairpersons approve the course themselves, after consultation with the course author. Some, however, ask other faculty in the department to review the study guide before final approval is given. When this approval is received by our office, we begin to accept enrollments. Students may enroll at any time during the year and have one calendar year to complete the course. Many will wish to complete it in a shorter time (see “time frame” information in the section on course Introductions).
   
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    Professional Recognition
      When your correspondence course is completed, you will have a work we are sure that you will be proud of. Many colleges and departments at Ohio University now recognize the contribution that Independent and Distance Learning faculty make to the University. Correspondence study guides have been evaluated by promotion and tenure committees and have been considered either a publication, a form of teaching and service, or a combination. Please ask if you would like copies of your study guide forwarded to such a committee.
     
    Other Use of Course Materials
      When your course materials are completed, they are copyrighted by Independent and Distance Learning Programs. This protects your work from being used by any other person or institution without written permission from our program. You are also prohibited from commercial publication of the entire course content in the same format as the study guide. However, you may use your content or adaptations of the material in some other format.

Some instructors have requested use of the study guides as part of the required materials for their classroom courses. We can arrange to make study guides available for classroom students. Those students will be charged a price for the study guide which covers our production and printing costs, as well as a small handling charge.
       
     
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