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1.1 Course structure and published materials
Open University courses depend in large measure on the quality of their published learning materials in whatever medium they are delivered to students. Print is still the predominant medium for reasons of cost, ease of use and access, but there may be an increasing use of multimedia products delivered by CD-ROM or Internet, as well as continued use of established media including broadcast, audio- and video-cassettes and computer disks. More than ever, a comprehensive approach to the planning of course materials will be required, paying attention to the advantages and limitations of each medium (or multimedia product). With the advent of digital publishing, materials can be stored for use and reuse in different media. But the design of the final product for each course needs to be appropriate for the particular chosen medium, and must be planned in advance.
Early planning and preparation, and attention to the lessons of experience, are essential in order to achieve the end product of effective distance-learning texts that encourage and maintain the interest of students in each medium, while not overloading them.
Having set the course aims and objectives, the course team must agree on a publishing plan for structuring and delivering the course and its various elements. Such a plan will be required in outline for the University's course planning and approval stage (UCA1), though it will be developed and refined through subsequent stages (especially at the stage of preparing UCA5 spreadsheet discussed in Section 2 below). Advice in developing such a publishing plan may be sought from the senior editor for the responsible Central Academic Unit (CAU) and the relevant Project Control administrator, who will draw up the plan.
Course materials will, as we have seen, almost certainly continue to be delivered to a large extent in print, though increasingly there may be a CD-ROM or Internet component to deliver certain aspects of a course where this method of delivery offers advantages of interactivity, updating facility or immediacy. Materials of all kinds and media need to be paced and structured, more or less directly, around the student's study programme for the course year, divided into stages.
The study programme is most usefully divided by the unit of one week's work, or a combination of such weeks. (At The Open University the 'unit' is defined as one week's work, where one week is assumed to involve twelve to fourteen hours study.)
Undergraduate level courses normally represent either 60 or 30 CAT points (i.e. 32 or 16 units of work). Thus, for a CAT 60 points course, the student will have 32 weeks of 12-14 hours work and will expect overall to complete a unit over one week in time, while on a CAT 30 points course, with 16 weeks' work, one unit can be thought of as spreading over two weeks in time. Learning materials for publication perform a central role in the total study prograrmme and must be structured accordingly.
Main texts and supplementary material
Published learning materials can usefully be divided into main texts, which form the core content of the course and its presentation, and supplementary material which includes assessment material, extra study guides of various kinds, audio-visual booklets and offprints of already published materials. Main texts are normally designed to last for a number of years to make use of economies of scale both in development time and in production cost. Main texts beyond Level 1 are often 'packaged' as published or copublished books, where appropriate (see Section 4 below on copublishing of main texts). Again in the multimedia era of digital publishing, main texts may be delivered at least in part via media other than print, including CD-ROM and Internet.
Supplementary material may be produced in new or revised form annually, and provides a flexible route for some updating of material (though it is essential that such revision is planned and costed in resource estimates: see Section 7 below on Supplementary material).
Course readers and set books
In addition, a course team may prepare a course reader, a new publication using published articles and extracts, sometimes with original contributions, forming a coherent whole. This reader may be included within the Set Book Scheme and be purchased by the student. Alternatively, it may be bought in by the University for distribution to students. (See Section 5 below on Course readers.) Finally, the course team may prescribe an established book as a set book for the student to buy (see Section 6 below on Set books).
Units, blocks and unit equivalents
The way a course team structures its published materials will depend on a number of considerations, including the level, the aims and objectives and the subject structure of the course.
At Level 1, where a simple learning structure is of paramount importance, it makes sense to link main texts directly to the unit of one week's (12-14 hours') work, i e. one text = one unit, or at most a double unit. At Level 2 and beyond, it may be necessary to introduce various combinations: the double unit, the block of four units or one month's work, or text volumes that are to be studied over any number of weeks and are therefore equivalent to multiples of units or numbers of unit equivalents. (The term 'block' is sometimes used loosely to refer to any binding of main text material that comprises more than one unit equivalent.) A more flexible structure will make it easier to reflect the thematic structure of the course and the importance of its different sections. For advanced level undergraduate courses, and in postgraduate, diploma and certificate courses, various study models are adopted. Often such courses (including many second level courses) have copublished components.
In the multimedia era, using digital publishing where main text components of a course can be delivered on line or by CD-ROM as well as in print, it is important not to forget the discipline of working to the student's study programme and restricting the quantity of (perhaps diverse) materials to the time available.
It is important to bear in mind that, whatever the model adopted, the main text is only one component of the student's study programme: in particular, the length of each 'main text' must take this into account. Also, as a check on student workload and course costs, it is helpful to think in terms of unit equivalents, i.e. a notional division of the course work into numbers of weeks of study.
1.2 Course length: number of pages
Student workload
To begin with, course teams for a given course should plan their learning materials in relation to student workload. With printed materials, the traditional measure is how many pages of material of a given type an average student can be expected to study in the time available, after all other activities have been allowed for. This measure of 'pages' or some other measure appropriate to the medium needs to be applied whether the final delivery to students is in print or some other medium. Where optional routes or materials are part of the teaching strategy, as may well be the case with material designed for CD-ROM or for access by the Internet, clearly the implication of these options needs to be taken into account. The important point is that due account is taken of the expected load on each student and a reasonable measure used of how much a student can be expected to study in a given time period.
As a rule of thumb, course teams should assume that a student has twelve to fourteen hours of total study time per week. Allowance of time must be made for all elements of study and assignments to be completed. In this context, the hours available for a particular study component can be converted into a reasonable estimate of page equivalents on the assumption that an average student can study at the rate of about four A4 printed pages (about 2,500 words on average, depending on the number of illustrations and the design) an hour.
Thus for a traditional main text component if a student is reckoned to have eight hours available for study, the text should not exceed 32 pages of A4 print, or around 20,000 words. For highly complex and dense material, or texts that are rich in activities and highly interactive, some extra allowance of study time may have to be made, and the length will be correspondingly shorter. Overloading of the student must be avoided at all costs.
It is essential to keep monitoring length, once agreed, throughout the drafting process (see Section 9 below), to guard against any excess. Enforced cuts at the last minute may be arbitrary and damaging to the structure of the course as well as costly.
For more precise estimates on individual courses, and for estimates on material designed to go out on CD-ROM or Internet, it will be necessary to take advice from the course editor and the design group coordinator for the responsible CAU on conversion of word and illustration extents into pages or page equivalents.
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