What should I name my pages?
Page names help you and they help the student navigate through the lesson. As a final step of writing the lesson, it is helpful if you name pages in some sort of sequence. This gives students a sense of where they are in a section of the lesson. For example, in an environmental law lesson on Hazardous Wastes, you may choose to name pages "Hazardous 1/7", "Hazardous 2/7", etc. Thus, even with branching question which would not be named under this scheme, students have a sense of where they are in the material. Some faculty prefer instead to tell students in the introduction that the lesson contains 7 major questions, for example, and their subparts. Then each page includes a header such as "Question 4."
CALI Author permits you to give the pages any name you want. However, there are several technical and pedagogical aspects that you should consider before naming your pages. You've probably noticed that this Guide uses simple names such as Question 1 and Question 2; although, that is more for ease of example and should not be construed as the best naming convention. From a teaching point of view, generally page names that help you and the student keep track of the topic are more useful than headings such as 'Question 1', and 'Question 2'. As expected, there is an exception to this statement. When you're creating branching questions, it may be easier for you to keep track of all the branches if the names of the branching pages are related to the source page. For example, in the CALI Demo Lesson branching pages leaving a page are given the same root name and followed by a number designating the relation of the branching page to the source page. Accordingly, if the source page is called "Blue sky 1," the first sub-question is labeled "Blue sky 1-1." This allows the author to quickly locate all related 'Book pages' in a lesson.
Another factor to consider when choosing a page name is that the page name is displayed at the top of the page in the student view mode. Here, we see the top of a standard page in the student view mode for our sample lesson. Across the top of the screen we identify the lesson as being written using CALI Author (field 1, the CALI Author header appears in all lessons), the name of the lesson (field 2, here, Lesson Title): the name of the page (field 3, here, Contents): and lastly the authoring property mode that you're in (field 4, here, the sample page is on the Question tab).
Therefore, foreshadowing the answer in the page name is probably not a good idea. Likewise, page names that are cryptic can become confusing to you as an author. Remember that page names help you keep track of what material you have covered and they help you create links and branches between the pages. Think of page names as an organizational tool for you as an author and choose your page names accordingly.
Specifically, CALI Author has a couple of technical requirements that must be satisfied when naming a 'Book page'. Like a telephone number, page names are a unique identifying piece of information for CALI Author. You cannot have two pages with the same name. Page names in CALI Author are not case sensitive. Thus, CALI Author considers 'USES OF THE COMMA' to be the same page name as 'Uses of the Comma', and it will not permit the second name. Should you inadvertently try and name a second page with a name already in use, CALI Author will prompt you for a new name. Additionally, CALI Author does not accept page names that include double quotation marks. Any quotation marks used in this Guide to designate page names are for ease of reading only.
