Instructional Materials

LEARN: What and Why

In any course, there are key subject matter content concepts and skills that students need to learn. After clearly defining your course learning objectives and key assessments (i.e. how they’ll demonstrate what they’ve learned), the next step is to choose the instructional materials and learning activities that will lead students to achieve the learning goals (Wiggins & McTighe, 2012). 

Determining Materials and Activities: Step 3 of Backwards Design (UBD) 

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Quality instructional materials are fundamental to student engagement in your course, as they not only make the student experience more interesting and enjoyable, but also reflect the instructor’s effort and interest—and therefore contribute to building the student-instructor relationship. 

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• use materials that are interesting and up-to-date 
• ensure the material is accessible 
• present content in multiple ways in order to appeal to students’ different learning styles and align with Universal Design for Learning principles
• review materials to ensure they align with course learning objectives 
• ensure there are diverse and unbiased representations of gender, race, ethnicities, etc. (Medel & Pournaghshband, 2017)

ENGAGE: How to do it

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Textbooks

Digital or print textbooks and anthologies are commonly used in many college courses, online and in person. A good textbook can help anchor any course, but it’s not always easy to choose the right textbook to accompany your course. Here a few things to consider in selecting an anchor textbook for your online course (Lochiatto, 2009):

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The material freely available and accessible for students 24/7 from anywhere. For more information on UMass Library Course Reserves, see the links below:

• UMass Library webpage on Course Reserves

• Creating a Link for Course Reserves

Lectures/Tutorials

Lecturing is another common method for delivering course content in person or online, during synchronous or asynchronous sessions. However, research shows that students lose attention after 10-15 minutes (Richardson, 2010), at most.

Accordingly, it is recommended to use some of the following practices to make your lectures more engaging (Zimmerman & Steinke, 2015):

• “Chunk It”
• Break your lecture into key concepts/topics and create lectures (live or recorded) of no more than 10 minutes
• Review your lecture slides/notes, and ask:
• Do I need to say all of this? 
• Can students read or watch a video about some of it instead? 
• Create a cycle of listening and doing
• After each ‘chunk’ of new material, give students an opportunity to participate in a learning activity: discussion, Q&A, debate, reflection, small-group assignment, practice examples/problems, etc. 
• Use illustrations and real-life examples
• Concepts are better understood and ‘stick’ when applied to a real-life situation
• Illustrate concepts with actual images/videos and examples
• Be personable and use humor
• Be yourself and allow your personality (and some humor!) to shine through while you are lecturing 
• It’s okay to make mistakes; your video lectures don’t need to be polished Hollywood productions
• Take a “less is more” approach on the slides
• Use minimal text on your presentation slides and enhance with photos, images, etc.
• Use simple, sans-serif fonts and contrasting colors, so your text is easily readable

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• For live, synchronous lectures, Zoom is the platform commonly used. 
• Schedule a Zoom meeting and practice Meeting With Your Class in Zoom
• For asynchronous lectures, you can use Echo360 or VoiceThread – which is a more interactive tool that allows for students to comment on and respond to the lecture with text, video, etc.
• Request an Echo360 course, download Echo360 Universal Capture, and record a practice session 
• Record a practice VoiceThread

Open Education Resources

Open Educational Resources are educational materials and tools offered freely for anyone to use and—under some licenses—to re-mix, improve and redistribute. They include:

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OER are created by individual educators and institutions that seek to provide an alternative to the rising costs of education—and the create a more participatory, collaborative and global approach to teaching and learning.

APPLY to your course

Review your course, asking yourself: 

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• Schedule a Zoom meeting and practice Meeting With Your Class in Zoom
• Request an Echo360 course, download Echo360 Universal Capture, and record a practice session 
• Record a practice VoiceThread
• Add Library Reserves to your Moodle Canvas course

• Explore the OER available on the UMass Library OER Webpage

References & Resources

The Council of Chief State School Officers. 2016, December 4. “What is OER?” William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. 

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