Instructor Notes in the Margins

[Chris B]

I'm working on creating some training material which will amount to an instructor guidebook and a student workbook. By and large they will be the same material except the instructor guidebook will have additional notes in the margin. It's important that the page numbers between the instructor guide and the student workbook match up nicely. This is a pretty common feature of training material and I've been trying to implement it in Flare. Here's what I've worked out so far.

I've created a new page layout with the body frame consuming 2/3 of the page or so with one third remaining for the instructor notes.
I've been adding instructor notes as text boxes with a float set to outside left frame.
I have a conditional tag for the instructor material so it only shows when I'm publishing the instructor guidebook.

It seems to be working for me but I'm not entirely happy with the solution. The getting the text boxes to appear in the proper vertical location on the page is frustrating. The other annoying bit is that the student workbook only uses 2/3 of the page. I'd prefer to have the student workbook use the entire page and then shrink the instructor content down in size so that the page numbers still line up, but I can't see any easy automated/stylistic way to make that happen.

Am I going about this the right way? Has anybody tried something similar? If you guys have any ideas or suggestions I'd love to hear them.

Thanks,

[SteveS]

Some thoughts...

How are you controlling whether your publication is the learner or facilitator guide?

I would be inclined to create a separate TOC (almost identical) for each. I'd create a different masterpage (or page layout, whatever you are using) for each as well. Within my stylesheet I'd create a font, based on the normal font, that is smaller than the normal font to shrink the content in the facilitator guide.

You could also experiment with a text box (Insert -> Text box), and conditionalise the text box so it is excluded from learner and included in facilitator guides.

Hope this sows the right seed...

[Lydia]

Hi Chris,
a few ideas:
- Are you on Flare 10? Then you can use more than one body frame on the page layout. Maybe that helps you getting the positioning of text right.
- I don't know of any option to automatically shrink the text to a certain size. Apart from using a different font. But that doesn't guarantee it will fit a predefined space. Maybe you can work with percentages or ems, but that is still not the same as shrinking/fitting to a fixed amount of space.
- Would it be an idea to use the instructor notes space as space for notes of the students themselves? I always take notes during training and when there is no space I end up scribbling between the lines and wrapping notes around the text.

[Nita Beck]

I have created instructor and student versions of training guides. For these, I use section numbers for each and every heading. I also don't put the instructor info in text boxes in the margins. Rather, the instructor info is interspersed wherever it is needed, it appears in a distinctive color, and it gets conditioned out of the student guide. As a result, the page numbers of the instructor guide and the student guide do not match, which is why I include numbers in the section headings. That way, the instructor can say "Turn to section 3.4" instead of "Turn to page 7". FWIW, the instructor was me and my students were Flare newbies. We were easily able to stay in sync as I delivered the training in a classroom setting.

BTW, the page layout allowed for a wide right margin specifically intended for notes.

In another Flare project from which I produced a traditional user guide, I actually did have "margin notes". I can't quite recall how I set them up (and I can't readily get my fingers on that project), but I do recall that the pagination sometimes got funky and I realized over time that they were more trouble than they were worth.

[ToddPh]

Just as an observation, I spent a few years teaching Microsoft MCSE courses. I used trainer materials that had both options mentioned in the original post: content in a separate column and aligned by page number, and trainer content interspersed in the student material and section numbers.

Of the two, I found Nita's solution to be the most comfortable because the trainer notes would be right with the content that it related to, without any odd pagination issues. When my students would ask for a page number, it was easy to throw that back to the class to bring other students into participating "my book uses different numbering, does someone already have section 3.4 up that can give us the page number?" I never had a complaint.

I think there are merits with both methods. Is there any way you can ask some of the trainers that will be your audience?

[Chris B]

Some thoughts...

You could also experiment with a text box (Insert -> Text box), and conditionalise the text box so it is excluded from learner and included in facilitator guides.

Hope this sows the right seed...

Hi Steve, this is in fact the approach I've taken, the problem is in getting the instructor content to appear in the proper location vertically within the page, but I'm getting it narrowed down and hopefully will be able to predictable place text boxes at a specific vertical location in the margin.

[Chris B]

Hi Lydia, I am on Flare 10 and I experimented with more than one body frame. Near as I can tell, body text flows from one body frame to the next and there is no way to restrict certain topic text to body frame 1 or body frame 2.

Utilizing that extra empty margin space for notes is probably what I will end up doing. I figure having space for notes isn't really a bad thing. I can promote it as a feature of the student workbook rather than viewing it as a limitation of the software.

Thanks

Hi Chris,
a few ideas:
- Are you on Flare 10? Then you can use more than one body frame on the page layout. Maybe that helps you getting the positioning of text right.
- I don't know of any option to automatically shrink the text to a certain size. Apart from using a different font. But that doesn't guarantee it will fit a predefined space. Maybe you can work with percentages or ems, but that is still not the same as shrinking/fitting to a fixed amount of space.
- Would it be an idea to use the instructor notes space as space for notes of the students themselves? I always take notes during training and when there is no space I end up scribbling between the lines and wrapping notes around the text.

[Chris B]

Hi Nita and Todd, Seems like a reasonable solution. I'm going to keep moving forward with instructor notes in the margins and see if I can't finagle something out of Flare. If I can't get it to work out then I'll implement section numbers with instructor notes interspersed in the text and just conditioned out of the student workbooks.

I have created instructor and student versions of training guides. For these, I use section numbers for each and every heading. I also don't put the instructor info in text boxes in the margins. Rather, the instructor info is interspersed wherever it is needed, it appears in a distinctive color, and it gets conditioned out of the student guide. As a result, the page numbers of the instructor guide and the student guide do not match, which is why I include numbers in the section headings. That way, the instructor can say "Turn to section 3.4" instead of "Turn to page 7". FWIW, the instructor was me and my students were Flare newbies. We were easily able to stay in sync as I delivered the training in a classroom setting.

[Lydia]

Hi Chris, since version 10, there are frame breaks. So you can tell text to start in the next frame. Now if you use that and conditionalize the text of the notes frame to only show up in the instructors book, this could work out. You could of course also have alternative (conditionalized) text that goes into the notes frame of the student's book only.