Standard 4: Instructional Materials

Standard 4.1

A variety of engaging and up-to-date instructional materials and tools are used to present content and support achievement of course learning outcomes and module objectives.

Standard 4.2

Instructional materials include copyright permissions and are appropriately cited, modeling attribution and style formatting for students.

Standard 4.3

The relevance of instructional materials and their relationship to activities and assessments is clearly explained.

Instructional Materials

Using a variety of relevant instructional materials helps to address different depths of learning, increase student engagement, and accommodate diverse learning styles. The value of variety is supported by research-based frameworks, such as Universal Design for Learning (UDL). Variety may take the form of multi-media, textbooks, articles, open educational resources, instructor-created resources, websites, and more.

In addition to variety, it's important that resources are contextualized within a lesson, activity, or assessment. The relationship between the instructional material and its application to an activity and/or assessment should be clearly explained to students. Lastly, sources used for materials in a course should adhere to copyright permissions and be referenced using an appropriate style, such as APA, MLA, or Chicago.

Please review the information below to learn how we will ensure your course meets this standard.

Open Educational Resources (OER)

Instructors are encouraged to use Open Educational Resources when possible. An OER is a resource that is published under an open copyright license and can often be adapted and integrated into module lessons within an online course shell. OERs exist in many different formats (e.g., books, websites, videos, etc.), help to lower the cost of education for students, and can increase the variety of instructional materials used in your course (helping you meet Standard 4.1).

Please see the UW Library's Open Educational Resources page for information about an Alt-Textbook Grant, OER Guide, and Creative Commons (CC) Guide. The librarian within our design team can also answer any questions you may have about OERs.

Direct Instruction

Often times online courses don't include enough direct instruction, which can make it difficult to meet course workload-credit hour requirements. Instead of simply listing resources for students to read or watch, we'll aim to scaffold learning within online lessons, activities, and assignments by employing the three phases of direct instruction:

I Do: How are you modeling and explaining new material and the ways in which new material connects to previous concepts?
We Do: How are you guiding and coaching the learning process? Providing prompt and actionable feedback is one way, but preemptive checks on understanding and formative feedback can help support learners before misunderstandings are documented in assignments.
You Do: How are you providing independent practice? Keep in mind, independent doesn't have to mean alone. Group work can provide collaborative practice independent of the instructor.

Incorporating direct instruction will help the course meet Standard 4.3. For more information about the Direct Instruction model, please read:

Brokey, K. (2015, July 13). Rethinking direct instruction in online learning. Faculty Focus.

Copyright Permissions & Source References

Copyright Permissions

If we are embedding from or linking to an outside source within a course page, we do not need to worry about copyright permissions because we are merely pointing students to the original source of the work, not duplicating or redistributing the work in any way.

However, if we upload or integrate content from an outside source into the course shell, it needs to fall under public domain, Creative Commons, or fair use. For more information, please see the UW Library's Creative Commons guide.

If the content is not covered under one of these three allowances, we could add the resource to the course reading list and refer students to the "Readings and Resources" tool in the left-hand menu to access it. This will also ensure that resources, like PDFs, are in an accessible format.

What About Images?

One thing to keep in mind is that images are not a special case. Everything on the internet should be presumed to be fully protected by copyright law - including images - unless it specifically states otherwise. There are many images that are freely available to use with or without attribution through public domain or Creative Commons licenses but they’re not necessarily easy to find. These sites are good sources for images:

Canto - UW's Photo Database has images that do not need attribution if used for UW courses.
MorgueFile and Pixabay have images that do not need attribution.
Wikimedia Commons has a mix of images that do and do not require attribution.
Compfight is a Flickr search tool that pulls Creative Commons licensed images that you can use with attribution.
Flickr creative commons tool on your Canvas pages includes freely available images.
When using Google Image Search, you can filter by usage rights and select label for noncommercial reuse.

Referencing Sources

Sources will be referenced within the course shell using APA, MLA, or Chicago style. For any content that requires permission, we'll also upload a copy of the obtained permission to the course shell. This expectation applies to all sources that require attribution and will ensure that your course meets Standard 4.2.