Overview

1. A lesson is made up of a number of pages and optionally branch tables.
2. A page contains some content and it normally ends with a question. Thus the term Question Page.
3. Each page normally has a set of answers.
4. Each answer can have a short piece of text which is displayed if the answer is chosen. This piece of text is called the response.
5. Also associated with each answer is a jump. The jump can be relative - this page, next page - or absolute - specifying any one of the pages in the lesson or the end of the lesson.
6. By default, the first answer jumps to the next page in the lesson. The subsequent answers jump to the same page. That is, the student is shown the same page of the lesson again if they do not chose the first answer.
7. The next page is determined by the lesson's logical order. This is the order of the pages as seen by the teacher. This order can be altered by moving pages within the lesson.
8. The lesson also has a navigation order. This is the order of the pages as seen by the students. This is determined by the jumps specified for individual answers and it can be very different from the logical order. (Although if the jumps are not changed from their default values the two are strongly related.) The teacher has the option to check the navigation order.
9. When displayed to the students, the answers are usually shuffled. That is, the first answer from the teacher's point of view will not necessarily be the first answer in the list shown to the students. (Further, each time the same set of answers is displayed they are likely to appear in a different order.) The exception is sets of answers for matching-type questions, here the answers are shown in the same order as input by the teacher.
10. The number of answers can vary from page to page. For example, it is allowed that some pages can end with a true/false question while others have questions with one correct answer and three, say, distractors.
11. It is possible to set up a page without any answers. The students are shown a Continue link instead of the set of shuffled answers.
12. For the purposes of grading the lessons, correct answers are ones which jump to a page which is further down the logical order than the current page. Wrong answers are ones which either jump to the same page or to a page further up the logical order than the current page. Thus, if the jumps are not changed, the first answer is a correct answer and the other answers are wrong answers.
13. Questions can have more than one correct answer. For example, if two of the answers jump to the next page then either answer is taken as a correct answer. (Although the same destination page is shown to the students, the responses shown on the way to that page may well be different for the two answers.)
14. In the teacher's view of the lesson the correct answers have underlined Answer Labels.
15. Branch tables are simply pages which have a set of links to other pages in the lesson. Typically a lesson may start with a branch table which acts as a Table of Contents.
16. Each link in a branch table has two components, a description and the title of the page to jump to.
17. A branch table effectively divides the lesson into a number of branches (or sections). Each branch can contain a number of pages (probably all related to the same topic). The end of a branch is usually marked by an End of Branch page. This is a special page which, by default, returns the student back to the preceeding branch table. (The "return" jump in an End of Branch page can be changed, if required, by editing the page.)
18. There can be more than one branch table in a lesson. For example, a lesson might usefully be structured so that specialist points are sub-branches within the main subject branches.
19. It is important to give students a means of ending the lesson. This might be done by including an "End Lesson" link in the main branch table. This jumps to the (imaginary) End of Lesson page. Another option is for the last branch in the lesson (here "last" is used in the logical ordering sense) to simply continue to the end of the lesson, that is, it is not terminated by an End of Branch page.
20. When a lesson includes one or more branch tables it is advisable to set the "Minimum number of Questions" parameter to some reasonable value. This sets a lower limit on the number of pages seen when the grade is calculated. Without this parameter a student might visit a single branch in the lesson, answer all its questions correctly and leave the lesson with the maximum grade.
21. Further, when a branch table is present a student has the opportunity of re-visiting the same branch more than once. However, the grade is calculated using the number of unique questions answered. So repeatedly answering the same set of questions does not increase the grade. (In fact, the reverse is true, it lowers the grade as the count of the number of pages seen is used in the denominator when calculating grades does include repeats.) In order to give students a fair idea of their progress in the lesson, they are shown details of how many questions they are answered correctly, number of pages seen, and their current grade on every branch table page.
22. The end of the lesson is reached by either jumping to that location explicitly or by jumping to the next page from the last (logical) page of the lesson. When the end of the lesson is reached, the student receives a congratulations message and is shown their grade. The grade is (the number of questions correctly answered / number of pages seen) * the grade of the lesson.
23. If the end of the lesson is not reached and the student just leaves, when the student goes into the lesson again they are given the choice of starting at the begining or picking up the lesson where they answered their last correct answer.
24. For a lesson which allow re-takes, the teacher has the choice of using the best grade or the average of the grades as the "final" grade from the lesson. That grade is shown on the Grades page, for example.