Once all of your existing materials are filed away in folders and easily accessed you can begin to think about the structure of your materials.
If you already have materials then this will require you to review and ensure that the materials uploaded are easily locatable for your learners.
If this is a new module then you should take the opportunity to design your learning materials to make them accessible and obvious for your students.
Step 1 – Reviewing the module handbook
Review your module handbook. Is the module new or has to been recently reacredited in which case it may have been updated. Ensure that you include clear objectives at the start of the course, this is likely to come from the module handbook. It is also good practice to include specific objectives for each session or each week so the student understand exactly what will be happening that particular session.
How and when will the students be assessed, how will this be made clear in the learning materials? Formative and summative assessment needs to be clearly marked. Giving students an indication of the mark breakdown between assessment components and mark schemes/rubrics as well as submission dates.
Is the learning to be synchronous where the learning materials are just a support act, asynchronous where the student will be following the materials on their own, or a mixture of the two?
Step 2 – Making a plan
Plan out your materials before you start, create a storyboard/session overview document, to follow the learning materials from start to end. Remember this does not mean that you need to produce and upload all of your learning materials right at the start for the whole course, but do make sure the structure is in place. See the example below which can be shared with the students.
Plan out your interactive activities, you may need to test these out. In the example below demonstrations will be done to show the students how to sculpt, weave and craft with paper, you may need to rehearse these aspects of the session or discuss with your demonstrators who will be leading these sessions how they are to be conducted. Are you going to be using the flipped classroom? How will you ensure students can find and complete the pre-work?
Step 3 – Writing introductory content
Introduce yourself, include a little bio or link to your profile and include your contact details or the departmental contact details if there is an administration email for example. When you create new content, add this to the relevant folder.
Create a timeline for the students, this could be a simple table with week numbers, topic names and descriptions and when the materials will be made available to the students if they are not all made available from the outset. Include dates for assessment here too. See example below.
Step 4 – Gather your learning materials
You may have lots of learning materials already but may need to obtain some more. From year to year you may need to update your materials or create new ones if the syllabus changes following module reviews. New research may be something you want to include, you may need to refresh your case studies for example, to make them more relevant. Save all of these items into the folder structure you have created.
Gather any text, images, videos or other materials for your Blackboard Documents. Text can be saved in Word documents to begin with. This can then be easily copied and pasted to the the Blackboard Documents.
Check all new files for accessibility.