Resource Authoring and Sharing
Creating learning materials for your students is a time-consuming business. One way of using your time efficiently is to reuse or repurpose (edit) existing resources, rather than spending time creating and often duplicating materials that are already available. The 'Introduction to VLEs' section has some eaxamples of repurposing existing materials. Many electronic resources are relatively easy to repurpose (or edit) for a specific class. This depends on the resource format. For example, text based resources in standard formats (e.g. .doc or PDF) can be quickly and easily repurposed or updated, though other more specialist formats, such as .mov files, may be more complex to amend. The question is - where can you find resources to reuse or repurpose?
As a tutor, you probably have experience in sourcing, repurposing and reusing learning materials for your teaching. This may involve searching for materials within the library, asking colleagues for useful resources or even reusing material sourced by previous cohorts of your students. These are useful ways of sourcing resources for reuse within a VLE. This section will explore where you can find electronic learning materials as well as why you might want to share your own resources with others.
Repurposing Your Existing Materials
You can use tools within The Microsoft Office suite to make your materials more usable and accessible within your VLE, for example by using the 'save as a web page' function, or use tools such as CourseGenie (see the 'Introduction to VLEs' section for further information). Before converting your Word and PowerPoint documents it is worth spending some time checking that you have used the features of these packages in appropriate ways. For example in Word there are built-in styling and formatting features and PowerPoint there are design templates and colour schemes. BbMatters have published a useful article 'Effective Use of MS Office Products in Creating Usable and Accessible Course Materials' which gives guidance on using these built-in features.
