Learners should control the speed and pacing of the content. Audio and video should be freely able to be re-winded, paused, and even skipped. It is recommended that learners always have the ability to control the pace. There are two types of learning control. Content sequencing – which learners can control the orders of topics, for example through a drop menu. Pacing – Learners control the how long they engage in each lesson.
Program Control or Instructional Control, is instructor lead control in a virtual class room. The instructor dictates the path and speed on the course.
Lynda-Probably the biggest source of online technology education material allows you to pic specific sections of a course when working through a program. This allows you skip around to learn specific skills and avoid repetitiveness. However the course wont display as 100% complete if you skip material;
- Principle 1: Give experienced learners control.- Learners have prior knowledge of the content and skills involved in the training The subject is a more advanced lesson in a course or a more advanced course in a curriculum Learners have good metacognitive skills The course is of low complexity (Clark Mayor p. 319)
- Principle 2: Make important instructional events the default – Make the most important parts of the content the default content so that learners in control may not automatically skip knowledge they may not know is useful.
- Principle 3: Design adaptive control. adaptive control (also called personalized instruction or user modeling ), the program dynamically adjusts lesson difficulty and support based on the program’s evaluation of learner responses.
- Principle 4: Give pacing control – controlling the pace the material is presented
- Principle 5: Offer navigational support in hypermedia environments.
ref: e-Learning and the Science of Instruction; Ruth Colvin Clark • Richard E. Mayer
