Sharing Content

Key Points:

• Choose a platform that has features to support your most essential requirements for conducting your course.

• Having chosen a platform, get used to it. Learn its features quickly so that you may exploit them in your course.

• Always keep your learners in mind. Avoid making them do multiple/complicated actions to access your course.

If your institute has made a choice of platform, then it is advisable to use the same, as the institute is likely to provide support for instructors using the platform. There are also likely to be colleagues who explore the advanced features of the platform and give tutorials to others. The students may also be familiar with the platform and may find it convenient to use the same platform across courses.

If the choice of the platform is up to individual instructors, then it is matter of comparing features across available platforms, identifying the must-have features for one's course, determining whether students will be able to access the course easily, checking whether the platform has tech-support forums and so on.

As an example, consider this course: We identified BodhiTree, IITBombayX, Moodle, and Google Sites, as potential platforms. We decided that our must-have features are ease of use for learners, the look and feel of a course, a discussion forum, support for creating simple assessments, and being able to embed content such as videos from YouTube. We decided that the course should have nearly zero barrier to entry, i.e., (i) it should be accessible to instructors from any institute without requiring them to register, login, or install some app, and (ii) it should have a simple and familiar interface for accessing the materials. We wanted high availability and cloud-based hosting. We also wanted to be able to create the course collaborative while working remotely. Hence we chose to go with Google Sites.

A detailed treatment of the tradeoffs in choosing a platform or LMS is beyond the scope of this course.

Platforms used at IIT Bombay

Having chosen the platform for your course, it is futile to ask questions such as 'Why does this platform not have built-in features to support exactly what I want to do'. Instead it is meaningful ask 'What can I do to achieve my objective within the features provided by the platform'. If that is not at all possible, then you may need to use a supplementary platform. For example, you might host your course content and assignments on Moodle but use Piazza for discussions, or Slack for collaboration, or Google Drive for shared documents, or WhatsApp groups for communication.

Technology for uploading content

Following is a non-exhaustive summary of platforms suitable for different content types:-

• Text based resources: See these how-to's for uploading and sharing documents using

  • [Google Drive]

  • [Dropbox]

  • [OneDrive]

  • [Moodle]

  • [Google Groups]

  • [Slack]

  • Note: Prefer to convert all text based content to pdf as it can be accessed on most of the device types.

• Audio: See these how-to's on uploading and sharing audio files with

  • [Google Drive]

  • [Moodle]

• Videos: See these how-to's on uploading and sharing videos from

  • [Youtube]

  • [Vimeo]

  • [Moodle]

  • [Google Drive]

  • Note: Youtube and vimeo allow you to host videos privately and share them via a link.

• Quiz and assignments: See these how-to's on creating and sharing quizzes using

  • [Google Forms]

  • [Moodle]

• Assignment submission pages: See these how-to's on creating file submission pages on

  • [Google Forms]

  • [Moodle]

Disseminating content to students

Having uploaded content onto some platform, the communication to students just needs to carry links to the resources.

It is important to keep in mind that students may access the course materials at times convenient to them and not necessarily in sequential order. Having small assignments immediately after a module and appropriate submission deadlines can be used to ensure that most students access most of the material as per the instructor's plan. Regular communication from the instructor to students, regarding content being uploaded, assignment deadlines, and discussion forum activities, is vital to ensure that the course stays on schedule.

Use the features of the platform to achieve these goals. For example:

• Moodle has various options for content dissemination, assessment, discussions and communication. [See this how to on Moodle].

• Google Sites is easy to build and quick to deploy. It allows sharing links of resources or embedding them into the site. [See this how to on Google Sites].