Map Your Course for Ease of Use

Your palms begin to sweat. You watch traffic whiz by you at an alarming rate. You're trying to merge into a lane of unending traffic traveling at a much faster than legal speed limit. This may be what it's like to drive in a large city that is unfamiliar to you. It can be a panic inducing event. Now, think about this same trip with a friend as a copilot, and a shiny new navigation system delivering turn-by-turn instructions. Ahhhhhh nothing could be finer than a Sunday drive in the city!

For many first-time users of an online course's management system, the panic can be just as scary. They need to remember a login and password, they need to find their course from a list of several sections and instructors. Once they are in the right course, they need to be able to find the first assignments and learn how to submit them. All of these steps are easily taken for granted by a veteran user. On top of all this, students need to know how to navigate your course. Depending on how complex your course directory structure is, even the most experienced online learner may have troubles navigating. As the instructor of an online course, I urge you to take a step back and examine your course's navigation.

Some course's navigation is straight forward. There is a very linear progression for the student. However, the Internet is a very dynamic entity allowing those that develop in it to take a user almost anywhere. There may be certain restrictions placed on any given CMS either by the developing company of the CMS, or the System Administrator. For the most part, instructors have the ability to manipulate their navigation in any way they see fit. There is nothing wrong with adding complexity to your navigation if the content and your pedagogy require it, but you may want to add a flowchart that maps out all destinations in your course.

There are a couple of ways to do this. The first is to develop a site map. In fact, some Course Management Systems have a site map built in to their interface. A site map is a text based way of showing the topic or title of each "page" in the course. Each of the "page" listings in this site map is a hyperlink that will take you to the page it calls out. A site map can be organized in several different ways. It can be designed to list pages by category, alphabetical order, or by how each page is nested in relation to its parent directory. Most complex Web sites have a site map as a way to assist visitors in finding what they are looking for.

The second option only differs from the first in that it is image based. You can use a flow charting application like Microsoft's Vizio, or Omni Groups Omnigraffle to visually map out the flow of your online class. This type of visual can show students how the site flows and how each area relates to all the others in a course. The image can be hyperlinked to the individual pages of the course if you have have a degree of technical competence in writing HTML. You may just want to create a PDF document that students can download, print and keep next to their computer. Students can then use this as their map to navigate into the far reaches of your course.

Creating some type of navigational map is not something that everyone has to do. If your course is small, or has few places where information is saved, a map is probably not necessary. If your course contains large numbers of resources and multiple nested directories, a course map is almost mandatory. Besides, creating a map may help you to better organize your course. Think about developing it before you begin populating your directories. You will be able to streamline your navigation and in the end make your course that much more navigable by your students. Creating a course map is a way to help your students navigate to their own success.