Portal:Paramedicine/Program Structure Guide

Welcome to the Program Structure Guide for Paramedicine This resource will teach you how to structure a program suitable for Paramedicine

Why Have a Program Structure Guide?
This project aims to present information to users in a consistent and therefore familiar and user friendly way. By structuring our learning materials, users are able to navigate freely through the various pathways without having to constantly stop work out what they have to do next. But this guide is about more than just layout. The goals of the project have been established in an attempt to maintain the vision of Wikiversity while tailoring to the needs of the project and in the process create an interactive and enjoyable learning experience. The primary objective of the project is to create 3 types of resource. The first is the educational information, this is the stuff aimed at presenting new information to users and makes up the bulk of the pages. The second are discussion pages, each and every class should have links and directions to them. These are where students can collaborate with each other as well as contributors and clarify information or suggest how the pages could be made more usable. The third and most exciting are the Projects. These collaborative pieces are aimed at not only teaching the users creating them, but they also contribute to the project as usable resources in teaching other users!

What is the Structure of the Project?
The project is divided into Programs. Each program has a clearly stated set of goals, which are each met by classes. Each class meets the program goal it is prescribed in small chunks called lessons. Programs do not necessarily have a clear level of difficulty, and some programs may be equally as difficult as possible, but all efforts should be made by Contributors to guide Users through the programs in a logical progression where the User is neither overwhelmed or underwhelmed. The programs themselves are structured in a linear fashion with classes ordered in increasing difficulty, however some flexibility should be allowed for Users to select the educational "path of best fit" for them.

Step 1: Have an Idea or Notice a Gap
If you've come to this page you probably have an idea of what your program might include. If you have no idea what topic to choose, but are really keen to create a program, now is the time to consider what the program might set out to achieve. Perhaps you should browse the programs offered and see if you notice any information gaps you can fill. Remember programs are not aimed at teaching everything at once, they are segments of knowledge that follow a theme or topic. In regards to depth and breadth of subject, good rule of thumb is if it would take longer than a week of full time study to complete, it's too broad, and needs to be simplified somewhat. Perhaps split your idea into two programs. If on the other hand it would take less than a week of full time study to complete, perhaps you should think about diversifying the topic a little bit.

Step 2: Contextualise Your Program
Now that you have a solid idea you should ask yourself "does my idea maximise benefit to the Users at the project?". That is, will the User's time spent studying this topic be worth the outcome knowledge. If the answer is no, think about how you could tailor your idea to help Users along in their learning journey. Maybe instead of starting a program about "the benefits of tourniquets in New York" you should write a program about "haemorrhage control in the pre-hospital setting". At the end of the day the project is not here to dictate what is "useful" or "beneficial", that decision is entirely up to you, the contributor. Another thing that will make designing your program easier is making sure the topic is broad enough that it can be segmented into smaller, more manageable pieces. "The benefits of tourniquets in New York" is a really narrow topic, and while you could spend a week studying it, the benefits to the User would be limited, and the classes would be very specific.

Step 3: Set Out Program Goals
At this point you should have a solid understanding of what you want the Users to gain upon completion of this program. Now you have to create an educational pathway for the Users to follow that will guide them to the point where the program goals are met. But to reach this point you have to set out the goals clearly not only for the Users, but for yourself as well. Try to create a numbered list of User traits, skills or knowledge that should be able to be demonstrated by the end of the program. If your list is less than 10 points long, perhaps you should think about fleshing a few of the traits, knowledge or skills out, or even adding a few supporting goals. If you're completely stumped you might need to go back to Step 2 and re-contextualise your program a little. Once you're happy with your goals you should see if you can group them together a little, so that you have 5-8 small groups of 2-5 goals.

Step 4: Create Classes to Meet Program Goals
With your groups of goals you are now ready to create classes. Each class follows a sub-theme of the program theme and is aimed at achieving a few of the program goals. To follow the above example, some classes for the "haemorrhage control in the pre-hospital setting" program might be "Wound dressings: get a pad and wrap, wrap, wrap" or "Haemorrhage Assessment: where's it coming from and how much came out?". Ideally each class should individually hold enough information to be considered a textbook subheading, or even a few. The goal here is to get as much information across, as clearly and simply as possible, in a short time, without skipping on any important information. You should now have a few classes planned out that aim to teach the entire program theme.

Step 5: Consider Assessment in Each Class
Now that you have your classes laid out you have to think about how you're going to help the User revise, solidify and assess their new knowledge. Are you going to put small quizzes at the end of each lesson? Are you going to ask the User to write a few quiz questions while completing other User's quizzes? Are you going to organise a learning group to try to plan a few lessons on the topic? or even get the Users to collaborate on a group video chat and run scenarios or test each other's knowledge? This project is yours to create and mould into whatever you want it to be, but ultimately the test of it's "usefulness" will be how it evolves in the hands of enthusiastic Users. Your goal is to try to form the foundations and framework so that Users can evolve the program towards the program goals, and the knowledge they gain is what they set out to achieve.

Step 6: Plan Lesson Content
So far, you have your overarching theme or idea, you have a list of goals, traits, skills and knowledge that demonstrate this idea, and you also have assessment to guide Users towards these goals. You now should think about what information the User needs to be able to complete the assessment to a satisfactory standard with no prior knowledge. If someone wanted to complete your program, with your goals in mind, what information would they need? Here is where you deliver all of the information for each class, in the form of lessons. You may want to make a list of all of the information required to reach the goals of each class. You may be surprised how much information is required for someone with no prior knowledge to learn something even as simple as how to dress a wound, without glazing over or skipping any thing.

Step 7: Plan Lesson Delivery
The delivery of your lesson content is the true test of how engaging you, as a Contributor can be. Will you deliver information by video? By bullet point? or a combination of the two? How will you incorporate redundancy and repetition to try to make the information memorable? How will you organise the information to make it easy to synthesise? These are creative decisions that make you the most important person in this process.

Step 8: Make Your Program Your Own
This is the most important part. Tweak your program until you, the Contributor are happy with it. If it doesn't meet the structure guides or fit the template that's okay! There's no point in having stock standard, completely repetitive Programs, that all look and feel the same. Make your mark and show your ingenuity!