IV.2 Instructional materials are presented in a format appropriate to the online environment, and are easily accessible to and usable by the student.

(Essential Standard -- 3 points)

Expectations

• 1. Make sure the students can easily navigate to the materials as well as the units, assignments, and assessments to which they are associated.

  2. Be sure that the materials and technology you use are understood by the students; how and where they are to be used, etc. If you provide links to external resources, such as websites, explain which unit or assignment the link is used for, or embed them directly within the assignment.

  3. When placing such materials online, be aware of the following:

     • Not all students have Microsoft Office, as it can be an expensive add-on. If you want to use native files (Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint slides, etc.) consider converting them to PDFs, and making those available as well. You may also want to direct your students to use OpenOffice (http://www.openoffice.org), an office suite like Microsoft Office, but free of charge. OpenOffice can create, open and write to files create in MS Office. You can also use, and direct students to use, Google Docs.

     • Be conscious of the file size of the materials you use in your course. While something may appear to load quickly on campus, or when using a broadband connection, not everyone has a fast Internet connection, so care should be taken to assure that the materials do not negatively affect the experience of students on slower connections.

  4. Do not use large videos in your course, as students with limited bandwidth will not be able to effectively utilize them as a resource.

  5. Consider streaming your audio and video materials.

  6. Utilize standard media formats. MP3 or OGG for audio are compressed formats that are widely supported. MPEG is a common video format and is supported across all major platforms and by most popular media players. PDF for documents is supported by all major platforms (more so than office formats like Word or PowerPoint).

  7. Do not place materials on the library reserves, unless multiple students can use them simultaneously.

Examples

• • Use Collaborate to record lectures, which has the following benefits over the tools provided by PowerPoint:

    • Collaborate lectures are streamed to students, so they can almost immediately begin to watch them, regardless of the length of the lecture.

      • PowerPoint annotations tend to be quite large, and students need to download the entire file before they can watch it.

    • Collaborate works on all major platforms--Windows, Macs, Linux--as well as mobile devices.

    • Collaborate provides a bookmark feature, so students can easily jump around to different portions of the lecture.

  • Providing MS Office documents as PDFs, so students without MS Office can access them.

  • Using Google Docs to house your course documents, which has the following benefits:

    • Works on the most popular browsers, with no needed plugins

    • Works on mobile devices

    • Students can download copies of documents in their preferred format (Office, PDF, images, etc.)

    • Updates can be made instantly within a web browser, without needing to first download the document, edit it, upload it back into the course, and making sure the link still works.

  • Use videos posted to YouTube, as they are automatically streamed to students, and can be embedded directly into your course.