Writing a Self-Instructional Lesson

Context:
In this selection the author notes that teaching through self-instructional or correspondence materials "is different from any other kind of teaching you may have done." He gives guidelines for writing effective "tutorials-in-print" that should be useful to those assigned to write for distance education courses.

Source:
Rowntree, Derek. 1990 (revised edition). "Writing a Self-Instructional Lesson." In Teaching Through Self-Instruction: How to Develop Open Learning Materials. London: Kogan Page, pp. 81-91.

Copyright:
Reproduced with permission, non-exclusive English languagerights only.

The Tutorial-in-Print

It is vital that you keep in mind the learners you are writing for. But do not imagine them as part of a lecture audience—nor as textbook readers whose teacher is hovering somewhere in the vicinity. Imagine instead that you are tutoring one individual learner for between one and two hours. Everything you might want to say to this individual will need to be written down—forming what I have called a tutorial-in-print.

This is what you will need to do in your tutorial-in-print if you are to teach your individual learners:

• Help the learners find their way into and around your subject—by-passing or repeating sections where appropriate.
• Tell them what they need to be able to do before tackling the material.
• Make clear what they should be able to do on completion of the material—e.g. in terms of objectives.
• Advise them on how to tackle the work—e.g. how much time to allow for different sections, how to plan for an assignment, etc.
• Explain the subject matter in such a way that learners can relate it to what they know already.
• Encourage them sufficiently to make whatever effort is needed in coming to grips with the subject.
• Engage them in exercises and activities that cause them to work with the subject-matter—rather than mer ely reading about it.
• Give the learners feedback on these exercises an activities—enabling them to judge for themselves whether they are learning successfully.
• Help them to sum up and perhaps reflect on their learning at the end of the lesson.

How Much to Write?

Perhaps I ought rather to say "How little?" Newcomers to self-instruction are often surprised that learners take so long to work through their materials. It is rare to find an author who under-estimates the amount of material learners can get through in a given time.

When reading for entertainment—say the latest Jacky [sic]Collins or John le Carre—people may be able to read two or three hundred words per minute. But research indicates that people studying a self-instructional text will read much more slowly. As learners, they will be pausing to take notes, or to answer questions, or simply to reflect on how their own experience or beliefs relate to the ideas in the text. They may even need to read certain sections several times.

As a very rough-and-ready estimate, you might reckon on your average reader working through self-instructional materials at the rate of about:

For a one-hour tutorial-in-print, this suggests a total of (50 x 60, to (100 x 60) = 3000 to 6000 words.

With straightforward, narrative material (like this), some of your readers may exceed 100 words per minute. But with a complex, closely-reasoned argument—especially when the ideas are new to your learners and take some coming to terms with—their speed may drop to 50 words per minute, or less.

As for the questions, exercises and activities you build into your text—and these are essential in self-instruction—they can reduce the reader's overall speed yet further. Some activities may be particularly time-consuming. For instance, just the four fo llowing words—"Now interview six customers"—would be quite enough to keep your learners busy for an hour or more.

So, one cannot simply give a formula figure for the number of words that learners might be expected to cope with in a given time period. It depends on what you are wanting them to do with those words. For example, if you're wanting them to do practical work, you'll need to give them less reading to do. Likewise if you want them to study from an audiotape or draft an assignment to send to a tutor. Remember also that if you want your learners to read from some other book or printed materials, you will need to subtract the required number of words from what you might otherwise have reckoned to write yourself.

Even when the materials have been completed, it is sometimes quite difficult to predict how long the average learner will take over them. Your ability to predict will improve with practice, of course. Meanwhile, the best way to ensure you don't make unreasonable demands is to try out an early draft of your lesson on some typical learners. If they take too long, prune it ruthlessly! Early drafts often need to be reduced by 50% or more as a result of such tryouts.

It is easy for the self-instructional author to get carried away and generate far more work than learners can cope with in the time available. This can cause them much distress—and they may even drop out of the course. After all, unlike classroom learners, they cannot easily confirm with their teacher (or even with one another) that some of the material (and which?) can safely be skimmed or ignored altogether. I have many times seen evidence that courses are overloaded—but never the reverse.

How Long to Write?

This is another much-asked question for which there are no cut-and-dried answers. How much time you'll need to develop a given set of self-instructional materials will depend on so many factors—like, for instance, on:

• How much new thinking/learning you need to do about the subject-matter.
• How much you need to find out about the needs of your learners.
• Whether your materials are meant to be truly self-instructional or just a prelude or follow-up to other teaching.
• The extent to which you can get your learners to work from already-published material.
• How easy it is to think up appropriate and effective teaching strategies.
• What kinds of activity you are setting your learners.
• What media you are using.
• How many drafts you need to go through—and how many learners you need to try them out on—in order to get a version that produces satisfactory learning and is acceptable to colleagues.

A study guide. For instance, you might produce a "study guide" to help your learners get the best out of a not altogether satisfactory text (or tape). Such a study guide might include items like the following:

• Your overviews and/or summaries of the topic.
• Concept maps or other diagrams showing how the main topics and ideas are related.
• Learning objectives.
• An annotated bibliography.
• Guidance as to which chapters /sections to study and which to ignore.
• Specially-written (or audio-taped) alternative explanations—to be studied instead of sections in the materials that you think are inaccurate, biased, out-of-date, confusing, etc.
• Local examples or case studies—which you have prepared because they will be more appealing than those (if any) in the existing material.
• Your paragraph-by-paragraph commentary on the argument expressed in the text.
• Questions and activities based on the materials, section by section.
• Model or specimen answers to activities, and/or checklists whereby learners can evaluate their own responses to questions or activities that seem likely to produce unpredictable responses.
• Suggestions for practical work or experimental activity, e.g. guidelines or worksheets.
• A glossary of technical terms.
• A self-assessed test related to the objectives.
• Questions to discuss with fellow learners.
• Instructions for an assignment to be sent to a tutor for comment and/or marking.

Your study guide supplement to the existing materials may be minimal or extensive. At the very least, you must ensure your learners are provided with:

1. guidance on how to approach the materials;
2. a means of assessing what they have learned from the materials; and
3. advice on how to get additional help where necessary.

At some point, you may find yourself not so much supplementing existing materials as writing your own lessons and merely incorporating those materials. At what point? Perhaps at the point where learners must spend more than 50% of their time on "your" material. But no matter. In the following chapter, I assume that the lesson you are producing will be sufficiently "yours" to be called a tutorial-in-print. Even if you are merely supplementing existing materials, however, much of what I have to say will still be relevant.