Wikipedia is a good model to follow: each page is limited to the description of its topic.
The Page is not aware of the reader’s journey or skill level, it just delivers on the promise of its title.
It’s a Mentor’s job to suggest which articles to read, and potentially in which order, but every student’s journey should be a personal journey of discovery.
The same applies to videos and other content included in the Page: more often than not it is possible to avoid using sentences such as “as we have seen last week…” without any loss of educational value, or they can be replaced with more generic calls encouraging the students to get in touch if they struggle with some concepts that we seem to be taking for granted.
The key approach here is that of a content creator who puts up videos on YouTube rather than someone who is designing a traditional course. We should create our content with a non-linear mindset, and then shape linear paths when delivering this content.
The page title should be strictly descriptive of its content, always remembering that every word we add may prevent this Page from being useful for a different audience: a title like ‘Music business for songwriters’ may be justified if the content demands it, but if it was ‘Music business for creators’ it would be reusable in courses aimed at songwriters, electronic musicians, business students, and more.
The title should also – as much as possible* – avoid making any reference to any ‘level’.
A numbering system in the Page titles should absolutely be avoided, since Beebop is automatically prefixing each Page title with a number corresponding to the actual order in which it is presented (which means the numbers are always correct even when you change the order in which the content is presented).
Terms such as ‘basic’, ‘advanced’, etc should not be used, since what is basic for one course may be considered advanced for another.
So instead of having a Page called ‘music theory 1’ (where the number implies a level and order) let’s look at what will be covered in this Page and call it what it is, for example ‘pitch, scales, rhythm and melody’. And instead of having ‘advanced time signatures’ let’s have ‘compound and composite time signatures’.
*Exceptions to this ‘rule’ will exist, but it is still worth asking ourselves if anything that makes this page less reusable could have been left to a verbal introduction or a post in the class channel. Note also that Pages include the option for entering an academic level in their definition, and additional tags can be added to make it easy to search and group together all the Pages are used for, say, a songwriting course of level three. The main point is that none of this is visible to the student in the Page title, so the page can still be included in other courses regardless of what might have been the intended use when the Page was created.
Here are a few examples of ‘service’ or ‘utility’ pages which are normally created on other platforms but should not be necessary on Beebop.
Pages called ‘About this Course’ or similar: Bebop already has a default ‘Curriculum’ Page zero for each Module, which we can edit and fill with anything we want, including Learning Outcomes, Grading Criteria, contact details for councillors and student support.
The curriculum page does not show in the global list of Pages; instead it is saved with each version of Content, which means we can even edit it and adapt it for each Term without affecting students from other classes / terms.
Pages for ‘suggested reading, bibliography, etc’: all this content can be listed within the Curriculum Page or at the bottom of each Page, depending on whether these are global resources or specific to each topic covered in various Pages.
Pages that act as containers for Assignments: Assignments exist as separate entities alongside other Pages and Files in the Course Content.
Pages that act as containers for various files and downloadable resources: downloadable resources can be added to the Pages they apply to. Alternatively, individual files can be placed directly in the Course Content without the need to have a ‘container’ Page for them. With that said, you may still decide to create a Page to act as a container for multiple downloadable resources if this fits the criteria of reusability for a Page (i.e. you expect that those files will always be grouped together and that those same files will still be useful in a few years time).
When creating a Page it helps to start with a little planning.
What is the aim of this Page? It helps to think about verifiable Learning Outcomes: creating a Page should not be different from creating a course, except that a course may have multiple learning outcomes whereas a Page should normally have just one.
So, even though creating a Page does not require a formal statement of its learning outcome, we should still plan each one by thinking in terms of “by reading this Page, the learner will be able to / will understand…”.
These learning outcomes cannot be something as broad and undefined as ‘the learner will understand the foundations of music theory’.
It is normally at this stage that one finds that what seemed like a good topic for a Page may translate into a collection of more specific pages, with titles such as “what do we mean by music theory”, “pitch and rhythm”, “intervals and scales”, “major and minor scales”, “the concept of harmony”, etc.
In trying to decide if the topic chosen for a Page is too broad, it helps to try and imagine if a single test or assignment can be used for a simple pass or fail.
The easiest mistake one can make when authoring content is to attempt to cover too much ground within a single Page (in other words, not keeping it specific enough).
This will inevitably lead to creating huge documents which are difficult to read and do not fit the criteria of reusability.
For the sake of giving context, it is very easy to end up with long introductions aimed at giving a broad overview, when instead the broad overview could be the specific content of its own Page.
It may be a good idea to allow yourself to write this long introduction, followed by multiple paragraphs to explore each angle of a topic, and eventually take a step back and see if what you have written cannot now be separated into multiple Pages.
But what about the need to have an overview of a broad and complex topic?
Well, having an overview is a specific topic in itself. This means that it’s perfectly fine to have a Page to define how broad and complex any topic may be, listing the many subtopics which can be then explored in as many separate Pages as required.
Article explaining the cooking process, development of cooking techniques and instruments, and list of instruments including hobs, ovens, open fire, etc.
The detail for the different types of ovens (electric, gas, microwave, etc) is left to a different Page called ‘Oven Types’. Recipes for Microwave Cooking will be in another distinct Page. And so on.
While it is possible to copy and paste text and images directly from a website or other documents like PDF etc, the following things may happen:
Images and videos do not show at all
Images show (but they are not on Beebop and could disappear without warning)
Some text and other graphical elements may look very different
All of the above is because the standard ‘copy’ command doesn’t copy text and images as we see them; it copies the HTML code that generates what we see.
So instead of copying images, audio and video, it copies a link to the original source. Depending on the source, these files may not be displayed at all, or they will appear to be working perfectly but we have no guarantee that they will continue to be there in the future.
As for the text, Beebop will recognise all the standard HTML so headers get displayed as headers and lists are displayed as lists, but visual style applied to those elements may look very different from what we expected.
For images and media, the best approach would be to download on your local device all images and media from the source document, and then upload these copies on Beebop.
For any text, we can use the command Copy as Text to automatically remove all the HTML code and reformat everything from scratch.