Okay, your learning outcomes are written (and they are measurable!), you have your assessments planned, and they map perfectly to your learning outcomes–now we need to get students from the introduction to the course, to a successful demonstration of skill sets!  That pathway is our content!  Regardless of your teaching modalities, you will need to spend some time thinking about your course content and gathering (or making) materials.

Course content, course materials, learning activities: what’s the difference?

Course Content

When you are creating the content students need to be successful in your course, you are really crafting an explanation of your ideas and knowledge, wrapped in context so that students understand how that idea fits in with other ideas and concepts throughout the course.  Content is anchored in the experience and expertise that you, as faculty bring to the classroom–and is evidenced in the collection of experiences, activities, materials, and assessments that your class contains as a whole.

Course Materials

Course materials are the pieces of the whole and can be delivered as primary texts, faculty-created videos, curated web-based content, films, documents, images, presentations, and any combination of listed items that will help students build the understanding, skills, and knowledge they need to succeed in course assessments and the learning outcomes of the course.

Learning Activities

Learning activities are the experiences you design for your learners to engage with the content in meaningful ways to build knowledge, including concepts and skills. This can be as simple as providing suggested questions to guide student reading or as complex as an interactive simulation. Typically, learning activities are not graded, although they can be. The best learning activities encourage deep thinking and provide feedback to learners on their grasp of concepts and performance on skills.

Multiple Means of Representation

While the notion of matching an instructional mode to a learner preference has not shown to improve learning outcomes, there is a wealth of research supporting the use of multiple means of representation of course content to help learners acquire knowledge. Here are some commonly used materials and software that UMPI faculty use to present course content to learners.

Text or presentation-based materials

  • Microsoft Word Documents
  • Powerpoint presentations
  • Google Slides presentation
  • Google Docs
  • LMS text-based pages & communications

Multimedia materials

  • Creating learning graphics/illustrations
  • Infographics and/or charts
  • Producing learning videos
  • Recording podcasts and audio-files
  • Creating interactive polls/surveys

Resources for Finding & Creating Content

Exploring UMPI’s Library Resources

The UMPI Library is a valuable resource when it comes to searching for just the right resource for your course.  They can help you easily navigate:

Our helpful Library staff should also be on your speed dial, for copyright concerns or questions.

Learn more about fair use, the TEACH Act & Copyright from Penn State.

University of Maine System supported tools

To get the highest level of support, from downloading software to creating, to troubleshooting when something is not working, opt for the wide variety of tools supported by the University of Maine System IT team.

These include:

Open Education Resources (OER)

Open Education Resources (OER) are simply educational materials that have an open license or are in the public domain.  The nature of these open materials means that anyone can legally and freely copy, use, adapt, and re-share them. OERs range from textbooks to curricula, syllabi, lecture notes, assignments, tests, projects, audio, video, and animation.

Typically OERs are licensed under a Creative Commons license which allows free use and re-uses with appropriate attribution. 

Here is a short list of OER clearinghouses:

Tools for Creating Content

  • Our favorite graphic design tool is Canva. It’s free (sign up with your email), you can save images as .png, .jpg, or .pdf, and it’s super easy to use.
  • Did you know that you could be Using PowerPoint for graphic design?
  • Adobe Spark walks you through creating visuals in the glossy, shiny way that Adobe products are known for.  The free version includes plenty of features. While you are there, check out Spark pages for student presentation ideas!

  • Curate and use amazing, artist-created graphics from the Greats (all are CC-licensed)
  • Thinglink, but you can annotate any image
  • WordItOut creates awesome word clouds
  • Unsplash and Pixabay have free accounts for beautiful, high-quality photos and illustrations, that you can use to make your own memes, and presentation charts and increase the visual appeal of many of your course materials.

  • Animoto is a slide-video creator that has a free educator account that you can apply for–you can download the MP4 file, or upload it to Youtube
  • Powtoon has a free education account, and this cool tool allows you to make illustrated videos and upload them to Youtube.  Note: you want to give yourself plenty of time to play with this tool–it has a learning curve 
  • Loom is a video recorder that can invite social media-like conversation, and they have a free EDU account!
  • Veed allows you to create great explainer videos, with easy-to-use editing features!

Follow this handy-dandy guide, to copy course content to another course, or another semester in Brightspace!  To copy an assignment from one course to another course/section, simply choose “copy” from the Assignment page:

Open the assignment menu and choose to copy to another course

Then select your course section from the list.