Building a lesson

The Designer is where lessons are built. A lesson is an ordered list of elements; the Designer is a thin shell that lets you add elements, arrange them, and configure each one's design, settings, scoring, and report behavior.

Where your cases live

Every case belongs to exactly one place, and that decides who can see it:

• An organization. Instructors and admins build here, and every instructor in that organization can open, edit and deploy the case into its courses.
• Your personal workspace. Every Theta account has one — a private space of your own, whether or not you belong to an organization. Cases you save here are visible only to you and can't be deployed to other people. You run them directly with Run from My cases; there are no courses to assign them to, and your attempts appear under My submissions with full scoring and reports.

If you belong to an organization, the Designer opens there by default; the Designing in bar at the top says which space you're in and lets you switch.

This page covers the parts of lesson-building that are the same for every element. For the specifics of an element, see its own page — each follows the identical Design → Settings → Testing → Scoring → Report shape.

Adding elements

Open the Designer and add elements from the element picker. The available types are grouped to match clinical workflow:

Each element you add becomes a card in the lesson. Selecting a card opens its editor.

Ordering elements

Drag elements into the order learners should encounter them, using the grip handle on each card. Reordering works with both mouse and touch, so you can rearrange a lesson on a tablet just as easily as on a desktop.

Templates vs. fixed cases

When you design an element you choose how its values are produced:

• Fixed — you set the exact values; every learner gets the identical case.
• Template — you pick a category, and Theta generates a fresh case in that category for each submission.

Linked elements

Some elements depend on another. The Speech in Quiet tests (SRT, word recognition, sound sensitivity) derive their behavior from an audiogram in the same lesson, so you link them to an Audiometry element. A linked speech test inherits the audiogram's template/fixed setting automatically.

You can also mark an element as hidden from learners — useful when an audiogram exists only to drive a linked speech test and shouldn't be shown on its own.

Configuring scoring and the report

For each element you decide what counts. Every scorable field is set to one of three states:

This lets you show something on the report for context without it affecting the grade. See How scoring works for the full model and Reports & PDFs for what the output looks like.

Settings and element presets

Each element exposes settings (transducer options, masking rules, display scales, and so on). New elements start from your organization's element preset — the default values appropriate to your conventions — which you can then override per element.

Saving and previewing

The Designer saves your work as you go. To experience a lesson the way a learner will, use the preview/try flow before assigning it. When you're happy, the lesson is ready to be placed in a course for learners to take.

Who owns what you build

The Designer always works inside one organization, named at the top of the page. A case you save belongs to that organization, which means every instructor and admin there can open, edit and deploy it — saving is all it takes to put a case in your org's library, and switching orgs in that header switches both the list and where your next save lands.

Deploying a case into a course, and taking your own copy of a case Theta publishes, are covered in The lesson library.

Element reference

Dive into any element:

• Audiometry
• Otoscopy
• Tympanometry
• Acoustic Reflexes
• Otoacoustic Emissions
• Auditory Brainstem Response
• Speech in Quiet
• Information
• Questionnaire