Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon

Organizing Content for Student Success!

Posted by Rondi Schei

Goal: Organize your course materials to create a learning path that progressively guides your students through each week of the term.

Organizational Barriers

Unfortunately, organizing our content as we would on our personal computers creates significant barriers to students. For instance:

• Students do not know your personal naming conventions or organizational structuring. They are also left guessing at obscure file names.
• Students have to navigate to multiple places to view all the required materials for a topic or assignment. There is no directed path through the learning content.

Now multiply this by the number of courses they are taking! Figuring out the organizational style for multiple courses is a huge learning curve in and of itself. Your students might not be able to master it in time to be successful. This is magnified even more if they are unfamiliar with D2L Brightspace.

Create a Learning Path

1. Create a module for each Week or Topic. Avoid using sub-modules. See my 2018 version of this post where I talk about sub-modules in detail.
2. Add a module description. (Consider this to be the prompt you would say to your class at the beginning of a new topic.)
3. Add the learning content that pertains to that Week or Topic in the order you want student to review them.
4. Edit the titles of your content items, so they are clear. Avoid abbreviations.
   • Instead of “Ch3_2020.pptx” rename it to “Slides: Supply and Demand”
5. If you add a video from YouTube, TedTalks, Vimeo, etc, use the option “Video or Audio” from Upload/Create instead of “Create a Link.” This provides a video icon below the title.
6. Add descriptions to select items (these act as the “prompt” you might say in class as you pass out the document).
7. Make sure to include links to all your course learning activities (i.e. Discussions, Quizzes, Assignments) in appropriate modules. In addition, make sure each one includes a prompt for instructions. Even if it is to download an attached or linked resource.
   
   • Adding assignment specific resources to the activity descriptions, reduces clutter in  your weekly/topic modules. Plus, students have everything for the assignment all in once easy place, the assignment prompt itself.
8. If you use a publisher website for activities, include a link to the website in each module and consider using a short description to remind the students what activities must be completed through the platform.
   
   • Some instructors choose to add separate link to the platform login page for each activity, so that the due dates can be added to the Brightspace Calendar – something students love to see!

Getting Started

You might be wondering how do I do some of these things?

After reading through these instructions, you probably noticed that I reference clicking on a down arrow a lot! This is because those down arrows in D2L Brightspace are like right-clicking in Word or PowerPoint. Its an Action Menu and lists everything you can do to the item.

Attend a Training

Training sessions will be offered on this very topic!  Please go to the Instructional Support  Workshop Schedule to find a session that works for you!