Brief Description
The instructional materials support learners in completing learning activities and in achieving the learning objectives. Along with providing current instructional materials in your course another important aspect is ensuring that they are properly cited. Citing copyright material in your course models that practice for students which helps ensure that your students understand how to use proper citations.
Supporting Resources
Instructional Materials
Instructional materials may include materials that you have created or found materials such as textbooks, publisher-created content, multimedia or websites. Materials can include seminal works as well as currently published materials. It is essential that materials are up to date and varied as the content of instructional materials changes over time.
One key consideration is to thoughtfully incorporate role models for students within instructional materials via diversifying authors, readings, sources, examples, and images. These aspects tend to represent who “typically” is in a particular field. By having instructional material made in a way that all learners can see themselves and/or their communities represented, they can associate how they can be part of that particular field.
An additional consideration is to give students agency for the instructional materials. It is good practice to explain the purpose of instructional materials and how the materials are to be used to enhance student learning. For example, choosing between a curated list of readings, finding their own materials according to course guidelines, and/or being invited to offer suggestions not already specified.
One suggestion is that you clearly articulate the distinction between what is required material for the course versus optional materials.
Additional resources for instructional materials include:
- Quality Matters at Penn State: General Standard 4: Instructional Materials – Information and examples of instructional material as it relates to copyright and how to explain the relationship between instructional materials and learning activities.
- OER @ Penn State – Central location of Penn State’s Open Educational Resources (OER) that include browsing of course resources to adopt, reviewing Penn State created course resources, and the services offered to create your own OER.
- Penn State Instructional Video Guide
- Penn State Libraries e-Learning Resources – Library resource that has curated resources to find e-books and other course materials.
- Penn State Libraries Course Reserves – Library service that makes course material such as articles, portions of a book, etc. that are subject to availability to be accessible within the Library and online to students enrolled in Penn State courses. The Course Reserves department is available to assist faculty to provide course reserves materials and answer technical and copyright questions.
- World Campus Faculty Development Offerings
- OL 2400: Integrating the Library into Your Online Course – Learn of library resources, services, instruction, etc. to partner and collaborate with the library including course materials.
- OL 3400: Online Course Design – Discuss and experience such topics that are important components to the online course design process including designing and developing course content, locating pre-existing content, and exploring emerging technologies.
- ROAM – ROAM offers high-quality learning materials written by Penn State faculty. These materials are freely available for you to use, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute under a Creative Commons license.
- Finding Visuals for Course Design (Quality Matters) – QM has compiled a list of image databases, color tools, music, video, and other resources related to materials.
Copyright
One element of this standard is that the online course adheres to the current University policies for the use of third-party copyrighted material or is able to provide evidence of appropriate copyright clearance. This includes proper citation for copyrighted material provided where appropriate.
Some courses make use of media and/or technology developed by a third party who holds copyright on the use of these materials. It is the responsibility of the course developers to ensure that use of these materials follows University policy.
Required evidence that copyright has been met includes adherence to the following:
- Penn State Policy IP03 Courseware (formerly RA17) and approved and listed on Penn State Courseware.
- Penn State Policy AD95 Information Assurance and IT Security
- TEACH Act Resources
Additional resources for copyright include:
- Penn State Copyright Information – Perspectives on intellectual property, copyright, and legal alternatives
- Copyright and Legal Media at Penn State
- Copyright and Intellectual Property Resources (Dutton Institute, College of Earth and Mineral Sciences)
- Copyright Decision Tree – From the Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence, a diagram that can help instructors determine whether intellectual property can be legally used in courses under the Fair Use Doctrine.
Resources for Diversifying Instructional Materials
Author Representation via Open Educational Resource
- Open Syllabus Project
- Coalition for Diversity & Inclusion in Scholarly Communication
- Cite Black Women
- Gender-Inclusive Biology
- People of Color in Tech
- OER Commons – Curated Collections
- Penn State OER and Low Cost Materials
Image Representation via Image Repositories
- Unsplash – AllGo Plus Size Collection
- Adobe Stock at Penn State
- Flickr – WOCinTech Collection
- Nappy
- Burst
- Disability: In
- UK Black Tech
- Jopewell
- If/Then
- The Gender Spectrum Collection
- Images4All
- Disabled and Here
Name Representation via Name Generator
This resource was created by Penn Ralston-Berg, Amy Kuntz, Donna Bayer, Danielle Harris, Brett Bixler, and Renee Ford. For more information about our quality standards, see Penn State Quality Assurance e-Learning Design Standards.
Page Contact: Penny Ralston-Berg