Active content for preparation of teaching materials

Teaching materials such as study guides have implicit structure that can be exploited to explicitly assist in the learning and teaching process. Document technologies specific to the teaching context generate visible structures and linkages in a consistent manner across multiple course materials. We describe techniques that:

• Create, manage and validate links between the learning objectives, content related to each objective and corresponding assessment task.

• Explicitly present relationships between concepts, as a concept map, related to unit content and external study resources.

• Treat various study resources (study guide, presentation slides) as consistent views.

• Facilitate the use of external media to support multiple modalities.

The process creates teaching content as a single master document which is annotated to: identify learning outcomes associated with topics and exercises, relationships between concepts covered, references to external resources and media, as well as summary points and keywords. Different views of this master document produce the range of course documentation.

Examples of documents include: a study guide with learning outcomes linked to content, concept maps providing a graphical view of key relationships, and presentation slides that generate visual mnemonics for important topics.

While this structure simplifies formatting of learning materials it also offers additional benefits to the teacher. Reports are generated showing that all outcomes are covered and assessed.   Explicitly annotating and visualizing concepts allows the lecturer to ensure that all elements fall within a single scaffold. Simplified access to external media encourages alternative presentation modalities and produces presentations that are easily adapted to new themes.