Instructor Guides for cases

To facilitate sharing of cases between schools, it is helpful if there is an Instructor Guide (not same as the User Guide for OpenLabyrinth) for each case. This gives some tips to teachers about how best to use the case, special features, learning objectives etc.

At the moment, there is not a common repository for these. When cases are fully published, the Instructor Guides will be available via MedEdPortal. (MedEdPortal requires an Instructor Guide as part of the submission.)

Until recently, we had no particular place to put ’em in a case either. So they only were sent along with a case, if the author remembered.

I am now pleased to say that we can now embed them directly into the case:

  1. Upload the guide into the Files section for the case.
  2. In the case Details, near the bottom, in a poorly named section called ‘Labyrinth verification’, you will see the last button says ‘Instructor guide complete’.
  3. When you click on [Yes], it then provides a drop-own list of stuff from that case’s Files section. Simply point to the guide.
  4. [Save changes] blue button at bottom.

Now your Instructor Guide can be moved along with the case when you Export it.

Some sites might be concerned that this is ‘giving away the answers’ along with the test. Taking the above approach does not immediately make the Instructor Guide available to learners; only to authors. You have to embed a link to the Instructor Guide in one of the Nodes if you want learners to see it.

Some of our authors have taken a neat approach where they hide the Instructor Guide in a node behind a password. Then they can control who gets to see the Instructor Guide, without providing author access to the case.

We’ll cover how to use password-protected Nodes in another issue in the blog.