With a new academic year beginning, many readers have already done various tasks to manage the course materials on their NYU Brightspace course site. These tasks might include:
- Copying previous course resources and activities
- Adding new resources, activities, assessments
- Creating or revising your syllabus, assignments, exams, projects, or group activities
- Adding or replacing course readings, videos, podcasts, images, or lecture slides
Carefully managing these tasks will help you effectively complete the setup work required each semester for building your course site. With this in mind, it is important to consider how you are preparing, maintaining, and storing your course’s instructional materials.
While uploading materials to your NYU Brightspace course site, it may seem logical to use Brightspace as a long-term storage solution. This is strongly inadvisable for multiple reasons:
- Editing in Brightspace is destructive; there is no versioning, autosave, or post-save undo, so once you delete something, you cannot go back to a previous version
- File management in Brightspace is limited and has no search, versioning, history, or undo functionality:
- Basic sharing/collaborative functionality is only at the course level, meaning you’ll need to locate the correct course among your old courses to retrieve materials you want to re-use
- Sharing course materials at the department level is a manual process
- Storage space is limited
- Course tools are unsuited to immediate and/or frequent changes. For example:
- When a Quizzes question is edited, Brightspace will still keep a copy of the old version if there are existing submissions
- No bulk export or print functionality for Quizzes, Assignments, or Content items
Even more importantly, the Brightspace Grades tool does not easily adapt to immediate changes to quizzes, assignments, or gradebook calculations, and some edits may have unintended consequences.
Managing your course materials systematically can help you avoid clerical input errors, better accommodate changes to your course, and help you adjust your instruction as you get to know your students and/or respond to challenges posed by advances in Generative AI tools. Keeping a course inventory list, and using a descriptive storage folder structure are some basic steps you can take to make duplicating, revising, or replacing your materials more manageable.
TAKING INVENTORY
Common spreadsheet programs that you may already use (e.g., MS Excel, Google Sheets) make identification, categorization, and differentiation of your course materials much easier. Organizational structures defined in your course inventory spreadsheet can greatly benefit learning data analyses, since you will have sorted your instructional materials into categories that can be measured and compared. Additionally, revising or adding new course materials is easily tracked so your changes are accurately incorporated and evaluated. As an example, please see this sample inventory spreadsheet of a course organized by week.
Whether you are developing a new course, redesigning an existing one, or curating materials, having a course inventory can provide an effective outline of your course structure. Whether organizing by week, topic, competency/standard, project, etc. spreadsheets are especially suited to the task. For examples of exemplary course designs from fellow faculty, please see our Arts & Science Course Design LookBook.
GETTING ORGANIZED
Once you have an accurate course inventory, you may want to revisit how you organize and store your materials. For a top-level storage structure, it may be valuable to organize content by content or activity type:
Within this folder structure, further organizing content by week can be especially suitable for courses with sequential topics, but can also be useful in general:
Having an organized storage structure provides opportunities to consider instructional pacing, refine learning objectives/outcomes, and may better inform you about areas further for consideration/analyses or assist with programmatic assessment of curriculum.
TO SUM UP
Maintaining an inventory of, and storage structure for your course materials are essential strategies for effective course design, development, and management. Likewise, they can:
- Facilitate timely course changes (such as those informed by formative assessment)
- Provide a basic groundwork for analyzing course materials
- Streamline the course revision process
- Simplify collaboration on course and program development
Creating and storing your instructional materials independently of the NYU Brightspace learning management system (LMS) will help you develop instructional materials best suited to your pedagogy, and which can be used in a variety of technological platforms and mediums. Likewise, you will avoid limiting your instructional approaches to only those afforded by the LMS. Additionally, as greater detail is introduced into your course materials’ organization and management, more opportunities for instructional inquiry, reflection, and innovation can present themselves.