IDEAS February Digest

Every month, we’re aiming to post an IDEAS digest to share some of the resources, tips, tricks, and tools that our team has come across over the past month. I.D.E.A.S. is an acronym for Instructional Design Educational Activities Summary. Below are some reflections from our team of instructional designers that might be helpful in your own course design.

Instructional Designer 1

In the Content tool in Brightspace, I recently discovered that you can change the content arrangement so that content can be organized by “content type”. In other words, it will categorize “materials” (content pages), “quizzes”, “discussions”, and others. The handy part about this method of organizing a module or unit is that there are useful subheadings to further organize the activities that students must complete. To organize content by “content type”, navigate to a module in your course, select “Settings”, and change “Content arrangement” to “content type.”

Instructional Designer 2

I recently discovered that you can associate rubrics with discussions. Now we can help instructors through providing more in-depth feedback to learners.

Instructional Designer 3

We recently discovered another stock photo site that is royalty-free. We normally use Pexels, Pixabay, or Unsplash. Shopify has recently come out with a new royalty-free stock photo platform called Burst that seems promising.

Instructional Designer 4

Sometimes the content that I work with has been passed down from instructor to instructor over the years. So, the source of the content is not always clear, and in some cases, might have been borrowed from a textbook or website several years (or decades) ago. Grammarly is not only a fantastic tool for checking grammar, spelling, and punctuation, but I’ve been using it to check the originality of content to ensure that all content going into courses is original.