The Instructor Screens That eFrontPro Teachers Cherish
Hello and welcome to the third and final installment of our mini-series of articles focusing on eFrontPro’s Instructor screens, which make course management as easy as can be.
In our two previous articles we have covered the Instructor Dashboard, the Tools palette, the Discussions management page, the Courses listing, and the Course administration screen (along with its various tabs).
In today’s article we are going to focus on the most feature-full, and arguably the most important, Instructor-targeted administrative tool: the Lesson management page.
Getting There
Without any obvious links or buttons related to Lessons in the Administrator Dashboard or Tools palette, you might be wondering how you can add new lesson content, or edit an existing lesson.
The answer is simple: you can do that from the Lessons tab of the Course that the lesson belongs to. We’ve already covered this in last week’s article, but in case you haven’t read it, here’s a quick refresher:
To edit a lesson belonging to a Course, visit the Course’s Lesson tab, and look for it on the listing of the course’s lessons. Clicking on the “edit” link (the little pencil icon) next to the lesson’s title will take you to its management screen.
Similarly, to create a new lesson, just click the prominent “+ Add Lesson” button — a new lesson will be created and automatically assigned to the course you’re in.
The Lesson management screen
Just like a Course is a collection of Lessons, a Lesson is in turn a collection of content units — such as text, URLs, multimedia assets, files, tests, and so on.
The main Lesson management screen gives you a listing of the various units associated with a Lesson (its “Content”), and sports a menu bar at the top offering access to the lesson’s Completion Conditions, files, attendance records, and settings screen.
Clicking on the “Content” icon (the one depicting an open folder) will show a menu giving you the option to add training material of various types, such as content units, tests, and surveys. It also gives you the option to see any existing Tests or Surveys associated with the lesson.
Adding Units
A “unit” is the most commonly used content-type in eFrontPro.
If you select to add a new lesson unit, you will be asked to name it, select a source (e.g. whether you’ll enter its contents in the embedded WYSIWYG editor, link to a URL, or upload a file), and set a completion method.
The latter determines at which point a learner is supposed to have completed the unit, and can be set to “button” (the students has to click a button to signify they’re done with the unit), “time” (the unit is automatically considered read after the learner has had it open for some time) and “automatic” (where merely opening the unit means that they’re done with it).
When it comes to file-based content units, eFrontPro is smart enough to convert and display any kind of file that you might upload in the appropriate fashion (e.g. lay out images for inline viewing, load video files in a video player, convert PowerPoints to browser-compatible content, correctly import SCORM 1.2 material, and so on).
Adding Tests
A Lesson’s “Tests” page shows you a listing of all existing tests associated with the lesson, and lets you edit or delete any of them, or add news ones.
To create a new Test, click the “Add Test” button, give your new taste a name, and fill in the optional short description. You’ll then be asked to configure your new test’s options, including things like its duration, the minimum score required to pass it, and whether learners are allowed to repeat the test.
The real fun comes in adding questions to your Test, with eFrontPro supporting 10 different question types, question pools for automatic test generation, criteria-based test building, skills-gap testing, and numerous other options.
That said, we won’t be delving much deeper into Tests in this article, as they have so many options and features in eFrontPro that they deserve a full article of their own (which they’ll get soon).
Files
The Files tab lets you upload Word, PowerPoint, PDF, audio and video files to complement your lesson.
These files are displayed in the Lesson’s files library, and eFrontPro is smart enough to convert them into the appropriate formats for online display (courtesy of the proprietary EncodeMagic engine).
Condition Completions
Similar to the lesson unit’s completion method (which we’ve discussed earlier), a Lesson’s “Completion Conditions” lets you set a number of conditions that need to hold for eFrontPro to consider a course as “completed”.
You can mix and match between the following options:
- The student has to complete all units.
- The e student has to complete a specific unit(s).
- The user has to pass all the tests.
- The user has to complete a percentage of the units.
Attendance - Progress
This tab gives you attendance and progress statistics for all the learners following the course, and allows you to directly set a student’s grade (as opposed to having it be automatically calculated by their test results).
Last, but not least, you can use the student listing in the attendance and progress tab to view/edit any individual user’s profile (the pencil icon), and to see detailed reports on their progress (the charts icon).
Settings
Unlike the other menu bar icons in the Lesson management screen, Settings does not open a separate tab, but displays a drop-down menu where you can toggle a handful of options.
Those are:
- Whether to maximize the viewable area.
- Whether to show the learner dashboard.
- Whether the Lesson’s units should be read in order (“serial traversal”).
- Whether the Lesson should be available for offline learning.
Conclusion
In our final article of our three-part series on eFrontPro’s Instructor screens, we covered the platform’s Lesson management pages.
Powerful and full-featured, these pages are especially important in any instructor’s daily workflow, and perhaps the parts of eFrontPro where they will be spending most of their time in.
Stay tuned for next week’s article for more eFrontPro-focused news, tips, and tutorials.
