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).

Backwards Design Steps

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.

In choosing and creating content for students to read, watch or listen to, it’s recommended to:

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

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):

Thorough coverage of course topics
Currency—in content, edition, knowledge, etc.
Alignment of your learning objectives and the approach and resources in the book
Readability—clarity in definitions, examples, graphics, etc.
Clear instructions and examples of real-world applications of concepts
Quality learning activities to engage with the materials
Cost—note some e-book publishers allow you to ‘cherry pick’ chapters to keep cost down
Diversity—non-biased representations of multiple genders, races, ethnicities, cultures, etc. (Medel & Pournaghshband, 2017)

Digital Course Reserves

Digital Course Reserves are digital course materials which have been reserved by the UMass Amherst Library for use in a specific class. These include:

Scans of book chapters and journal articles
Links to databases and e-books
These also include audiovisual materials, such as streaming film and music

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

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

A note on instructor notes

Instructors often have notes and slide decks that accompany their lectures. Providing copies of these supplemental notes to students is not only helpful to students with a documented disability—but also to all other students, especially those who are more visual learners or who could not attend the live lecture due to a variety of circumstances.

Providing students with these notes is not “doing the work for them” but rather providing them with another quality, reliable resource to help them learn and succeed. This practice also aligns with the principles of Universal Design for Learning.

Technology for Lectures

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.

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:

Learning content: full courses and modules, textbooks, lectures/ tutorials, collections, and journals.
Tools: software to support the creation, delivery and improvement of open learning content

Implementation resources: Intellectual property licenses to promote open publishing of materials, design-principles, and localization of content.

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:

Do I have a variety of instructional materials?
Do my materials align with course learning objectives and assessments?
How can I ‘chunk’ my lectures into shorter, topical 10 min segments?
Are my slides too text-heavy? Can I adjust them to make them more captivating?
Where and how can I incorporate OER and e-reserves?
Are all of my materials accessible? Where and how do I need to make changes?
Do I provide students with a chance to do and engage with new content as it’s presented?

Based on your decisions on delivering lecture and content:

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 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.

Elder, A.K. & Katz, S. 2020. “Evaluating OER.” The OER Starter Kit Workbook. Manifold Scholarship.

Lochiatto, G. 2009, January 8. “How to Select the Right Textbook for an Online Course.”

Medel, P., & Pournaghshband, V. (2017). Eliminating gender bias in computer science education materials. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGCSE technical symposium on computer science education (pp. 411-416).

O'Keefe, L., Rafferty, J., Gunder, A., & Vignare, K. (2020). Delivering High-Quality Instruction Online in Response to COVID-19: Faculty Playbook. Online Learning Consortium.

Richardson, H. “Students only have ‘10-minute attention span’.” News.bbc.co.uk. January, 2010.

Wiggins, G. & McTighe, J. (1998). Understanding by design. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Zimmerman, J. & Steinke, G. 2015. “Teaching Tip: Designing Online Lectures and Recorded Presentations.” College of Continuing and Professional Studies. University of Minnesota.

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