Greg,
Hopefully I've understood the question - if I haven't my apologies.
In authoring, there is a line at the bottom of the screen that says "Properties". At the end of the bar is a little blue icon with boxes on it. Click on this icon and the properties section will expand.
If you have an activity selected, you will see the details for this activity. Changing the title here will change the title on the authoring page, and the title shown in the progress bar in learner. It does NOT change the title that is shown on the learner's page for that activity - that you need to do by bringing up the tool's authoring page (the three tab page accessed by double clicking on the activity).
This properties section also allows you to apply a Group to an activity (so that your learners work in teams within the lesson). It also settings for Run Offline and Define Later. Say you are going to have a classroom chat in the middle of the sequence but you want to do verbally (ie get people to open their mouths and talk) rather then on the computer. You can put in a Chat activity and then click Run Offline. When the learner's get to that activity, they will be told to see their teacher for instructions.
Define Later is used to mark activities for which you haven't finished writing the content. Say you have a Q&A and you have written two questions and you want to add more based on how the students are going during the initial activities. Then set the Q&A to define later and when the students get that far they will be stopped - they won't be able to see the questions. Then a staff member goes into monitoring and brings up the Q&A screen and can add new questions. Once the questions are saved in monitoring, the define later flag is cleared automatically and the students will see the questions and be able to continue with the design.
The properties box is where you select whether you want Random Grouping or Chosen Grouping, and how many groups should be created. It also allows you to set up the Gates - whether it is staff release in monitoring (permission), synchronised based on the learners or opening at a particular time.
See the attached screenshot.
Does that help?
Fiona
Posted by Fiona Malikoff
