Designing Non-Linear Courses

Jun 04, 2018

I am looking for ideas on designing a non-linear course i.e. there are no specific steps to follow. Any ideas?

5 Replies
Tom Kuhlmann

Whether the course is linear or not is an instructional design decision. Once you know what you want to do, you can set the triggers to follow any flow you desire. 

With that said, I'd do a search for some simple scenarios in the community. Nicole Legault built a good started file template in the downloads. 

I'd also learn to work with variables as those will give you much more freedom in crafting an adaptive or non-linear flow.

At it's essence, the person does something (trigger) and that goes somewhere. Thus you just need to know what you want the person to do and where you want them to go. After that, setting the triggers is relatively straightforward.

David Anderson

We recently hosted an e-learning challenge on adaptive branching scenarios. Several users shared their source files which should help you get an idea for common ways to build non-linear scenarios.

Here's a demo, download and video tutorial on how I built my example:

View demo | Download source

Video tutorial (YouTube)

E-Learning Challenge

Bruce Graham

Sometimes, I use the first few slides, in a VERY prescriptive way, to explain that the course is not limited, in any way. Than after that, apart from some vague groupings around content, they are free to wander around as they would in, say, Wikipedia. 

Tom's last paragraph sums this up well.

David - Primary/Remiadiation paths looks like something I need to investigate further, thanks :)

 

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