Lessons and activities: an overview
Creating a new course can feel overwhelming. You're thinking about how many lessons you should have, how long they should be, and whether you want to write or record your content.
One way to start organizing your thoughts is to start a course outline. You can do this through a variety of techniques, including mind-mapping, writing all your ideas out on post-its, or creating an actual outline. Most instructors find that once they start writing down all their ideas, it becomes easier to sort and organize them.
As you're organizing your course outline, think about how your content will fit into Ruzuku's system of lessons and activities.
Lessons are the basic organizational structure of Ruzuku. Lessons in Ruzuku don't have any content of their own. Instead, they act like headers or containers for groups of content.
Activities, on the other hand, are the basic building blocks of your course. Activities are where you'll place the content for your courses - videos, audio files, PDFs, discussion questions, etc. Activities are grouped together under a single lesson. By completing activities, your students will come to understand the concepts you are teaching.
Individual activities should focus on a single task, like watching a video, reading an article, completing an assessment, or putting something into practice. Activities also serve as the "to-do list" for your students. Each time someone completes an activity, she marks it as complete. Checking off the activity provides your students with an immediate sense of completion and progress.
There is no system limit to the number of lessons you can create on Ruzuku, or the number of activities. However, we recommend that lessons should take no more than an hour to complete, and that you limit the number of activities to 6-7 per lesson.
Keep in mind that your students are fitting in your coursework around lots of other priorities. The easier you can make it for them to consume and take action on your content, the higher your students' chances of success.