Adapting Content for Your Course

This table from COL's "Creating Learning Materials for Open and Distance Learning" guides you through the decision making process as you consider adapting vs creating your course materials. When you find resources that roughly meet your needs, then adapting those resources rather than creating the content from scratch may be a suitable decision. Depending on the quality of the resources, you may get away with re-using most of the content and adding a few activities and examples to ensure relevance to your learners' context. In most adaptation cases, you may have to re-design the assessment and self-assessment, and sometimes it is helpful if you re-do or add a summary and/or an introductory page, to bring your voice and perspective into the materials.

Steps in Adapting Materials

As you evaluate the resources to incorporate in your course, it helps to keep the following in mind:

• The target audience
• The learning content you need to teach
• The level of the resources in comparison to the level of what you need to teach
• The delivery language
• The delivery media

Assignment

By now you have considered creating content from scratch vs. adapting existing content and you have reflected on the writing style and the look and feel of your course pages... this means you are ready to Create Course Content in Moodle. Before you jump in make sure that you watch the Moodle video tutorials provided and learn a bit more about the LMS. It will save you some frustration if you are not very familiar with the learning environment.

After you watch the Moodle video tutorials, get started with the second book in this section. This book focuses on learner assessment and how to create quizzes and use the gradebook in the LMS.