Fundamentals of ODL Materials Design

For the sake of recipients’ (Open and Distance Learners) peculiarities exploring our contents, these essential points should be put into consideration while developing learning materials;

1. The paragraphing in the content should be as short and precise as possible. This is to enable quick grasp of your explanations without ambiguities.
2. Use of operational terms must have been well-referenced at the start of your contents with clear meanings/interpretations.
3. Use of ambiguous terms should be maximally discouraged for simple and meaningful terms.
4. There should be clearly-defined learning objectives at the beginning of your content which are explicitly explained as sub-headings in the body of the course.
5. Before integrating animations, tables, images and other multimedia learning aids into your contents, do make sure that the sentence (s) before and after them have connections / reference to them.
6. Do not make your learning contents all that the students need for maximum knowledge acquisition, add-up additional learning resources after the study where further knowledge about the topic examined can be explored. You can possibly create assessment around extra study for the learners.
7. There should be proper labeling of every learning aids you use in the course of your content development. Tables labelled accordingly with their captions as well as others such as Graphs, Images, Animations etc.
8. Examples and Illustrations should be localized reflecting Nigeria in every sense such as Name, Address, Culture etc.
9. The contents developed should be well-summarized at the end. The summary should reflect in brief the whole key concepts explained all through the course.
10. Essential and Key terms/explanations in the body of the course should be carved out in either bullets, numbering, bold, boxes, tables etc. These form the contents at the end of the course summary.
11. Ensure you have some assessment to evaluate previous studies in connection to the current topic. Highlight the learning objectives of the current topic. Inject mid-assessment in various formats (Objective Questions, Yes / No, Agree / Disagree etc.) while developing the course. At the end of the course also, ensure you have some questions to ‘bring-home’ all explained in the course.
12. Each of your Course Learning Objectives should be well detailed in explanations with prime connection to the main title.