Video 2: Making Your Content Findable
In this video, we will discuss ways of organizing and presenting your content so that it is findable for your students. What you want to avoid is a course that looks like this, where all of the content is dumped into a single content area, there’s no order or organization, as if it was done by stream of consciousness.
A better practice for your course is to usepredictable design. Predictable design means that all of your course content is organized and structured so that students can easily predict where a particular piece of content or information will be located, without having to go on a long hunt every time they have a new reading or assignment due. Content areas should be labeled clearly, and content should be grouped using a single organizing methodology throughout. Content that will need to be accessed frequently or with urgency is delivered in a location that is easy to get to and return to.
Blackboard content areas can contain a folder structure just like your desktop. Each folder can have its own interior folders, but beware of going too many folders deep so that students must click endlessly in order to finally get where they need to go.You should endeavor to keep both clicks and page lengths to a minimum. Too much clicking or scrolling indicates that the organizational system in the course may not be meeting its needs.
From a technological standpoint, it is much easier in Blackboard to create folders first, and then fill them with the content. When you’re finished adding content, consider making a short video introducing your students to yourself and to where everything can be found in the course.
Different courses have different organizational needs, but in general good course organization will be structured temporally (by week, session, module or unit), or categorically (all readings in one location, all assignments in another, all lecture videos in another), or both (inside each weekly folder are subfolders containing readings, or videos, or assignments, or lecture notes).
Make sure to give all of your content intuitive, easy-to-understand names. When you upload a new document, use the Link Title field to rename documents that may have file names that aren’t representative of their content. For instance, if you have downloaded a PDF from a journal, and the document name is a long string of random letters and numbers, rename the Link Title to be the title of the paper itself.
Using these techniques of predictable design, good course organization, and intuitive naming, your students will be able to find what they need inside your course, whenever they need it.