Instructional Materials

Instructional materials are aligned with the stated SLOs.

All course materials, including all assigned and optional reading and multimedia, are carefully and purposefully aligned with the stated course and module SLOs, enabling learners to make progress in the related outcomes.

For more guidance on how to select or create aligned materials, refer to the Employing Meaningful Course Materials unit.

The purpose of all instructional materials is clearly explained.

To increase student engagement and interest, it is important that learners are made aware of how and why instructional materials should be utilized in completing coursework and meeting related outcomes. Typically this takes the shape of a brief purpose statement associated with each resource or reading that highlights important aspects of the media, helps learners understand its value and connection with the course and module SLOs, and specifies whether or not the material is required or optional. These explanations are often provided within the resource introductions, module introductions, or syllabus.

All course media is easy to access and use regardless of modality.

Digital instructional materials should reduce barriers to access and be perceptible to a diverse body of learners with various cognitive differences, sensory needs, and language skills.

Images should be easy to read, crisp, and appropriately sized.

Audio and video materials must contain clear audio and images that play distinguishable content at a discernible and controllable speed and volume. Distracting ambience (e.g. unnecessary background noise, music, and/or visuals) is kept to a minimum.

Additionally, course content should be easily consumable regardless of device and modality (i.e. consider video length, scrolling, window resizing, etc.).

All media is easy to open; there are no broken links or missing content in the course.

There are a variety of engaging instructional media, representing diverse perspectives, including the instructor’s own expertise.

To support student success, course content should be available in multiple and flexible formats, such as textbooks, videos, websites, articles, interactive technology, infographics, simulations, and other multimedia. Course materials should intentionally engage students in learning and represent diverse perspectives, including the instructor’s own expertise, in order to help learners connect new information to prior knowledge, discern patterns and relationships, and ascertain how experts think.

For example, the course may supplement a traditional textbook on research methodologies with a recorded video explaining the instructor’s own research techniques and professional podcasts and journal articles from other authors in the field to further illustrate concepts.

The instructional materials articulate seminal and current work (as appropriate) in the discipline.

Course content should reflect the modern practices of each discipline and professional field. Timely materials may include recently-published textbooks and web articles, as well as infographics, slideshows, and instructor-created video content. Any use of seminal works should be accompanied by up-to-date research and scholarship within the discipline, as appropriate.

All course content complies with copyright laws and models ethical use.

Instructors are legally required to adhere to copyright laws for all course content, regardless of modality. Everything (i.e. webpages, software, textbooks, journal articles, documents, publisher content, images, videos, audio files, etc.) is automatically protected under U.S. copyright unless otherwise specified. Therefore, courses should only utilize content that is licensed under Creative Commons, released to the public domain, falls under Fair Use, or honors permission for use. As best practice, unless explicit permission has been granted, instructors should provide a hyperlink to course materials rather than directly uploading a copy of any outside content into their course site.

All material, including texts, files, images, publisher content, videos, audio recordings, websites, instructor-created resources, etc, must be properly attributed with discipline-specific citations (APA, MLA, Chicago, etc.). Proper attribution models academic integrity, ethical use, and sound practice for students and helps them build their professional scholarship skills for the digital age. Often content citations are located in the resource introduction, module introduction, syllabus, or Start Here.

Additionally, the course must indicate the licensing or permissions for all required and optional content. This typically accompanies the content citation within the resource introduction, module introduction, syllabus, or Start Here.

For more information on the application of copyright laws for course content, refer to the Employing Meaningful Course Materials and Using Open Educational Resources units.