Students (and designers!) became frustrated using “back” and “next” through all the pages in a topic when the topics have more than just a few pages! There was a need for a way to jump from page to page within each topic – a more helpful way to maneuver more easily in the course than by back and next buttons.

There were several renditions of this concept. For example, in Chemistry 2: Colonization of Planet X, the page number, the number of pages in the topic, and navigation to the other pages in that topic appeared at the top of each page. Clicking on the page bar produced a list of the other pages. The student can access any of these pages with just a click.

Some of the later CLASS™ courses have page numbers on each page that links to all the other pages in the topic. This eventually became a CLASS™ standard. It made it extremely easy to navigate back and forth between the pages in the topics.

In Health Science II, (right) and American History II (below) this information was placed at the bottom of each page. This became the standard location for the rest of the courses.

About the only drawback of adding navigable page numbers in a course is the production time due to the extra step. The link for each page has to be set up on every page. (The code can be copied and pasted from page to page, but even so, it is time consuming.) Nevertheless, it was well worth the effort for both students and designers.

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