Okay, your learning outcomes are written (and they are measurable!), you have your assessments planned, and they map perfectly to your learning outcomes鈥搉ow 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鈥檚 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鈥揳nd 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 91桃色 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 91桃色鈥檚 Library Resources

The 91桃色 Library is a valuable resource when it comes to searching for just the right resource for your course.  They can help you easily navigate:

  • 鲍惭笔滨鈥檚&苍产蝉辫; tool
  • Our  catalog
  • The University of Maine Systems vast  of journals
  • 鲍惭笔滨鈥檚&苍产蝉辫;
  • The  process
  • eReserve services for faculty (it鈥檚 faster than you may think!)

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

Learn more about 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  which allows free use and re-uses with appropriate . 

Here is a short list of OER clearinghouses:

Tools for Creating Content

  • Our favorite graphic design tool is . It鈥檚 free (sign up with your email), you can save images as .png, .jpg, or .pdf, and it鈥檚 super easy to use.
  • Did you know that you could be ?
  •  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  (all are CC-licensed)
  • , but you can annotate any image
  •  creates awesome word clouds
  • and  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.

  •  is a slide-video creator that has a free educator account that you can apply for鈥搚ou can download the MP4 file, or upload it to Youtube
  •  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鈥搃t has a learning curve 
  •  is a video recorder that can invite social media-like conversation, and they have a free EDU account!
  •  allows you to create great explainer videos, with easy-to-use editing features!

Follow this, 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 鈥渃opy鈥� from the Assignment page:

Open the assignment menu and choose to copy to another course

Then select your course section from the list.