Building a lesson
How instructors assemble, order, and configure a lesson in the Designer.
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 lessons live
Every lesson 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 lesson into its courses.
- Your personal workspace. Every Theta account has one — a private workspace of your own, whether or not you belong to an organization. Lessons you save here are visible only to you and can't be deployed to other people. You run them directly with Run from My lessons; 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 organization you're in and lets you switch.
What a free personal lesson can hold. One element, and it must be Audiometry, Tympanometry or Otoscopy. Every other element — OAE, acoustic reflexes, ABR, the speech tests, Hearing Aid — needs Pro, as does chaining two or more elements into a workup.
Running is never limited: Try in simulator plays any lesson, of any size, for free — including everything in the Element Explorer, where you can build and run any element without a subscription. Inside your own workspace the Designer keeps the palette in step with what you can save, so you don't build something you'd then be unable to keep. Organization-owned lessons are never limited at all.
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. It leads with the four elements most lessons are built from; everything else sits behind More elements, one click away. The picker remembers whether you left it open.
| Section | Elements |
|---|---|
| Shown first | Information, Otoscopy, Tympanometry, Audiometry |
| More elements | Questionnaire, Acoustic Reflexes group (Acoustic Reflexes, Acoustic Reflex Decay), Otoacoustic Emissions, Speech Testing group (Speech in Quiet, Speech in Noise), Amplification group (Hearing Aid, Hearing Aid Fitting), Auditory Brainstem Response |
A group card opens a small picker for its members. The fold itself locks nothing — it only keeps the picker short. In a free personal workspace the palette leads with the three free elements and marks everything else Pro.
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 values
When you design an element you choose how its values are produced:
- Fixed — you set the exact values; every learner gets the identical patient.
- Template — you pick a category, and Theta generates a fresh patient in that category for each submission.
Templates are what let a single lesson give every student a different patient while still testing the same skill. Mix and match — a lesson can have some fixed elements and some templated ones.
Linked elements
Some elements depend on another. The Speech in Quiet tests (SRT, word recognition, sound sensitivity) are calculated from an audiogram in the same lesson, so every one is linked to an Audiometry element. A linked speech test inherits the audiogram's template/fixed setting automatically. The speech patient belongs to the audiogram, so all the speech tests on one audiogram share the same values. That lets you put an SRT test before the audiogram and a word-recognition test after it, the usual clinical order, and they still describe one patient. The SRT → Audiogram → WRS button in the Speech group builds that layout in one click.
Deleting an audiogram with speech tests on it asks what to do with them: move them to another audiogram in the lesson (when there is one), or delete them with it.
A Hearing Aid Fitting — the fitting appointment — is linked the same way: it follows a Hearing Aid element above it in the lesson, picks up that case in the same attempt — starting from the aid as the learner left it after Verification there — and takes its template/fixed setting from it. Learners work them in order: the appointment opens once the Hearing Aid element is finished, and starting it closes that element. The Hearing Aid + fitting appointment button in the Amplification group adds both, linked. Deleting a Hearing Aid element that an appointment picks up from asks whether to delete it too, or cancel.
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 on its Scoring & Report tab. Every scorable field is set to one of three states:
| State | Counts toward score? | Appears on report? |
|---|---|---|
| Off | No | No |
| Scored | Yes | Yes |
| Report-only | No | Yes |
This lets you show something on the report for context without it affecting the grade. Elements that are never scored — Information and Questionnaire — still have the tab, holding just the choice of whether they appear on the report. See How scoring works for the full model and Reports & PDFs for what the output looks like.
Until you save an element's Scoring & Report tab, its card shows an amber Review scoring badge (and the tab shows defaults). Saving the tab clears it. Some elements are made of parts: the tests of Speech in Quiet, the test of Speech in Noise and the steps of a Hearing Aid element (Selection → Verification, always in that order). For those, turning a part on brings the badge back, because the new part has scoring of its own for you to check. Turning a part off doesn't bring it back. The badge is a reminder while you edit: when you reopen a saved lesson, the scoring it saved counts as reviewed.
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 lesson 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 lesson in your org's library, and switching orgs in that header switches both the list and where your next save lands.
Deploying a lesson into a course, and taking your own copy of a lesson Theta publishes, are covered in The lesson library.
Element reference
Dive into any element: