Course design. Skilling works hand-in-hand with the skill course design model (SCDM). SCDM helps you design effective skill courses. Skilling helps you implement them.

Lessons. Lessons are like textbook pages, but with questions, characters, exercises, patterns, and other Good Things.

Patterns, principles, and models. Types of schemas. People use schemas when doing tasks.

Conditional content. Authors can change what content a lesson shows, depending on whether the student reading the lesson has done a particular exercise, what degree program the student is in, whether the student is colorblind, and a host of other variables.

Exercises. Students need hands-on tasks. Not just one or two, but a carefully designed task sequence.

Grading. The grading system makes personal formative feedback easy, fast, and consistent. One of Skilling’s best things.

Feedback. Skilling makes large scale grading feasible. It automates everything except human judgement.

Questions. Skilling lessons ask students questions, as they read.

Characters. Characters are head shots of people expressing different emotions. I use them to represent students, taking the course alongside the real students.

Pauses. Pauses break up lessons into chunks. They implement the segmentation principle.

History. Skilling tracks everything students do.

Progress tracking. Students often have trouble keeping up, especially in online courses. How can we help?

Authoring system. The tools people use to write lessons, make exercises, etc. They’re designed for making skill courses, not for general web work.

Secure and private. Protection against XSS, CSRF, URL guessing, SQL injection, and other attacks. Protects student data from unauthorized access.

Accessibility. Skilling is designed for WCAG 2 accessibility standards, and to comply with section 508 of the US Rehabilitation Act.

Mobile. Course sites work on desktop computers, laptops, tablets, phones, whatevs.

Open source. Skilling is based on Drupal, a popular open source system. Code is open to inspection. And free.

Branding. Add your own colors, fonts, etc., to your course.

Scaling. Skilling helps you adapt to changing demand for skills courses.

Standardizing. Multi-section courses make it hard to maintain consistent quality. With Skilling, no matter which instructor, on what campus, students have similar experiences.