Getting Started
   

This section contains a graphical overview of the course development process and describes processes which precede the writing of the study guide manuscript: departmental approval, the memorandum of agreement, initial draft, choosing texts, overall design, and thinking about the examinations.
   
  Departmental Approval
    Before you begin to develop your Independent Learning course, you must obtain the permission of your department chairperson. On the Memorandum of Agreement (course contract), there is a line provided for the chairperson's signature. The Agreement cannot be signed by the Director of Independent and Distance Learning Programs without that signature.
   
  Memorandum of Agreement
    When you have received the permission of your department to develop a course, you will be asked to sign the Memorandum of Agreement (it will also be signed by the Director of Independent and Distance Learning Programs). The University requires this contract to protect the use of the material as a study guide. It is also the basis for arranging payment to you when the course materials are submitted to the IDLP office.
    Each Agreement has a date when the material is due in the IDLP office. This date will be determined largely by you, but we do expect it to be honored. If you cannot meet the completion deadline for your course, please notify us–in most cases, we will be happy to grant an extension of time. However, if no course materials have been submitted three months after the completion date on the contract, and you have not made arrangements for an extension, IDLP reserves the option of canceling the contract and arranging with someone else for development of the course.
 
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  Orientation and Initial Materials
    In order to assist you with the development process, we schedule a one-hour orientation to give you some background on our program and students and to answer whatever initial questions you may have. Then we ask you to submit the table of contents, and drafts of the introduction and the first lesson or two. These will be evaluated immediately by the Instructional Materials staff, and you will be given suggestions if alterations are needed. If you have significant questions or concerns at that point, we encourage you to schedule a short meeting with one of the course instructional designers/editors; otherwise, you may proceed to complete the manuscript. An editor is always available by telephone or e-mail to confer with you during the writing process.
   
  Textbooks and Reading Materials
    Required Texts
      Many faculty use the same textbooks for a correspondence course that they use in the classroom. Familiarity with the texts does make the development of a correspondence course easier. However, since the texts for the course will be a major source of content for the distant student, other considerations are also important.
     
  • Texts with good indexes, glossaries, appendices, etc., are very helpful to students learning at a distance.
  • In courses such as mathematics, statistics, accounting, or others where problem-solving is an important skill, textbooks which provide self-check problems or solutions to end-of-chapter problems are essential.
  • If most of your students find your classroom texts difficult, a more readable text might be preferable for independent learning students. Another consideration is breadth of coverage. If you need to add a great deal of material to that presented in your classroom texts, you may want to choose a more comprehensive book, although there is no reason why you cannot provide the additional content in the study guide.
  • Textbooks change editions or go out of print approximately every two to three years; therefore, we ask that you choose the most recent edition so that your study guide will not need to be revised after only a short time. If you are not sure if your preferred text(s) is the most recent, you can check with one of the instructional design specialists.
  • Although most college students are resigned to higher and higher book costs, if you have a choice of texts, please specify paperbound editions or the least expensive alternative. IDLP students order their textbooks and other required materials from EdMap, a local supplier of texts for distance learning students.
      Please submit your list of textbooks with full bibliographic information (including ISBN numbers) as soon as you have chosen them, so that we may order copies for editorial use.
     
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    Supplemental Texts
      Independent Learning students are often more highly motivated than traditional classroom students in pursuing knowledge. They may be taking your course to satisfy a personal desire to know, rather than just to earn the credits. We encourage you to include supplemental, optional reading assignments to enable students at a distance to further investigate a topic in which they are interested. Many courses benefit from a short bibliography, preferably annotated.
    Journal Articles and Other Resources
      You may decide to use journal articles, parts of other textbooks, or additional resources to supplement the required textbook reading for the course. These, unless they are optional reading, will have to be reprinted in your study guide. Although the use of such resources in the classroom might be considered to fall under “fair use” guidelines of the copyright act, course study guides, whether in print or electronic form, are considered “published works” and are subject to full copyright restrictions.
      If you intend to use journal articles or other reprinted material for required reading, please submit a list of these with full bibliographic information so that we may apply for reprint permission. We would also appreciate a clean copy of the article to work with.

We ask that you limit the number of reprints in a study guide, since these often require considerable time and effort to obtain reprint permission. Also, most require payment of royalty fees, which have become a significant expense.
 
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  Beginning at the End
    Although you may consider it unusual, the examination is an excellent point to begin organizing your correspondence course materials. After you have chosen the textbooks and become familiar with how they approach the course content, please think about the examinations. By considering them first, you will be asking yourself what it is you wish the students to learn and whether the examinations measure this learning.
    When you have developed a possible set of questions for the examinations, it is a good time to develop related performance objectives for the course. The
objectives, or goals, should be included in the introduction to the study guide, providing your students with a "road map" to guide them through the course and assist them in preparing for the examinations.
    Later, as you are dividing the course into lessons, you will want to develop learning (or performance) objectives for each lesson that are a subset of the objectives for the course as a whole. As you develop the kinds of questions (objective, essay, problem-solving) for your examinations, think about the kinds of questions you will use in the lesson assignments that will help students master the material that will be tested on the examinations.
    It is good educational psychology to use the same types of questions in the lesson assignments that will be used on the examinations. For instance, if your lesson assignment questions are normally essay in nature, you would normally not use only objective questions on the examinations, because that would be testing for a different type of knowledge than students would be acquiring through the lesson assignments. In your course, you may have sound reasons for having different types of lesson assignment and examination questions; if so, you need to state your reasons clearly to the students in the introduction of the study guide.
         
  Examinations
      We suggest that a correspondence course contain two supervised examinations, a midcourse and final. Another possible alternative is two midcourse examinations and a final, but we suggest that three be the maximum number of examinations. The supervised examinations should be no more than two hours in length, as students may have difficulty finding someone to proctor an examination longer than that. To protect the integrity of our examination process, we require two forms of each examination. The forms need not be entirely different, but enough so as to reduce risks of copying.
      An excellent teaching device for correspondence students is a self-check test or sample examination, included in the study guide just before a supervised examination. These may be separate lessons, particularly if you wish to have students submit the self-check test to you after it has been corrected. We encourage you to provide an answer key, which is usually included in an appendix to the study guide.
      Examinations in our correspondence courses are numbered as separate lessons. Directions for preparing for the supervised examinations should be included in the study guide, prior to the examination application (see sample). If a sample examination is used, students should be told that the examination questions are similar in scope and nature to the sample. If there is no self-check or sample test, students should be told how many and what type of questions to expect, as well as any special instructions. Some words of encouragement about test-taking may be helpful to an adult student who has not taken a supervised examination for a number of years.
       
     
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