Following on from a suggestion by Tony Hirst about using a mindmap to navigate an online course, we’ve started to map out the resources currently used in the Introductory Chemistry course.

As I write this post, it’s just a skeleton of the digital resources currently used in the course, organised into categories and sub-categories. If you’re reading this months from now, it may look quite different as it evolves into a more complete resource. We’ll see.

I do like the idea of using an interactive mindmap to navigate an online course. It provides a useful overview of how the course is structured and the associated resources that are available. It seems extensible, too, as some resources might be nothing more than URLs to third-party websites. As you can see, the mindmap we’re using here can be embedded into any web page as an iframe, so it’s quite portable, too. Mindmeister also allows mindmaps to be exported to Freemind and other formats so the data is not locked into a proprietary product.

I’m interested to see how we develop this.