Teaching material consists of text, presentations, media and exercises developed within the context of higher education courses and training programs.

Teaching material is seen as a living output, which is constantly updated and reshaped by teachers for the purposes of different courses and trainings, and to adapt to different audiences. An instance (i.e. snapshot) of a set of material used at a certain point in time by one teacher for a specific occasion is a release or final output.

With knowledge development and sharing becoming more prominent in the advance towards climate compatible growth globally, institutions worldwide produce ever larger sets of teaching material. If not properly shaped, these will sit within the institution’s boundaries, with limited reach outside of the program they are intended for, and will quickly become outdated.

Emerging concepts around teaching

The education landscape is changing dramatically. Focus in the pedagogical practice is rapidly shifting towards active and deep learning. The importance of active learning is underlined by UNESCO, which highlights that only active learning can lead to the development of skills and competencies. Competencies include: system thinking, anticipatory, normative, strategic, collaboration, critical thinking, self-awareness and integrated problem-solving.

In the teaching practice, therefore, attention is given to ‘what the student does’, rather than ‘what the teacher does’, as in Biggs. Teaching and learning are not seen in isolation, but rather as a teaching-learning binomium. A ‘class’ becomes a teaching-learning occasion. The teacher becomes a facilitator, who must ensure there is 1) teacher’s, 2) social and 3) cognitive presence in the learning practice, as in Hrastinski.

With the proliferation of digital means, there is a huge opportunity for online and hybrid education to enable the development of skills and competences as intended by UNESCO. Such development, importantly, will not happen only in traditional educational settings (e.g. academia), but also beyond, leading to so-called lifelong learning.

E-learning

There are several examples of e-learning environments, such as Coursera or OpenLearn Create by the Open University (the latter based on Moodle learning environment). The courses consist of theory (in the form of written material and/or videos) and practice (hands-on exercises, quizzes, self-evaluation practices). The students can take the courses at their own pace and obtain certificates upon completion. There is normally no interaction with the teachers. The way the learning material for the courses has been created can vary. Some key common features in e-learning material are:

Modularity
Presence of info-graphics
Short videos
Exercises (with ex-post correct answers and explanations for self-evaluation)
Availability in several languages

E-teaching

There are good examples of open-licensed courses and lectures, but these are normally made available by well-meaning and enthusiastic individuals, rather than cross-institutional teams. Fully open and collaborative environments for the development of courses, such as Wikiversity, do exist, though they do not provide a learning environment similar to that of Moodle, on which OpenLearn Create is built. The heavily curated teaching materials provided by Software Carpentry provide an example of best practice of Open Teaching Material. Software Carpentry designs numerous interactive and hands-on courses that are designed for self-learning and in-classroom or hybrid teaching. Software Carpentry also offers the service of workshops upon request, online or hybrid. The material is freely accessible, fully documented and continuously updated and structured in a way that allows gradual upgrade of skills at own pace (i.e. designed for lifelong learning). Due to the open license of the material, others are free to make use of the learning material in their own right. For example, the Nordic-based CodeRefinery has based its own courses on the Software Carpentry material. The material is developed and prepared in GitHub following precise workflows , but it is rendered as webpages for learners. Full references and instructor notes are available for each lesson. The development of a lesson is conducted collaboratively using the features available through the git version control software, and social tools on Github. The Github issue tracker is used to record ideas and suggestions and receive feedback from learners. Pull requests are used to discuss and review new contributions. Releases are used to publish completed versions of the lesson to the webpage, including metadata and attributions.

Developing teaching material

Developing teaching material in a collaborative fashion can increase the reach of the courses, their uptake by teachers and trainers worldwide, the depth of review, the efficiency of update. Creating or updating text, lecture modules, lectures, courses, hands on exercises etc. online in common repositories accessible by teachers from any institution can enable collaborative development. To this end, the material shall preferably sit outside of the learning management system of one specific institution, licensed and attributed at any instance of its use. The update and upload of material does not need to be dynamic and/or live, but it benefits from being version-controlled. Following these principles will make the teaching material community-based, retrievable and reusable (that is, compliant with U4RIA-goals).

Key for enabling the collaborative development of teaching material is that it has at least (but not necessarily only) the following attributes

Open-licensed
Available online
Editable
Modular
Versioned

Other characteristics that are highly desirable are:

Availability in several languages
Availability of metadata including:
- authorship and attribution
- acknowledgments of funding
- collaboration and review
- license;
metadata associated to all media and info-graphics
Availability as plain text + collection of media and metadata (with no template)

Example of teaching-learning material from an OpenLearn Create Collection

Partners in the Climate Compatible Growth program have created a collection of free and open access courses on Modelling Tools for Sustainable Development. These courses apply best practices for e-learning material and practices that allow for collaborative course development as follows:

Open access license: CC BY 4.0 license on all the course material; every piece of media (figure, graph, or video) is also licensed with CC BY 4.0 license or more permissive ones and attributed;
Available online: the source material is gradually being made available on a public GitHub repository;
Editable: for newly created courses, the source material is editable through the GitHub repository, to different degrees (e.g. by submitting issues or directly by submitting pull requests); for courses that were existing and mostly based on .pptx presentations, the source material is editable in .pptx;
Modular: each course is divided into lectures; each lecture is constituted of 4 modules; each module presents 5 concepts of 150-300 words each and a list of references; at the end of each lecture, a multiple-choice quiz with automatic proofing tests the understanding of the student and gives feedback when the questions are answered;
Versioned: GitHub provides automatic version control; under development: twice a year, an instance of the course, corresponding to a certain commit, is going to be published on Open University’s OpenLearn Create platform;
Availability as plain text + collection of media and metadata: for new courses, especially, the lecture modules are created as collections of Markdown files (for the text), folders with the media, and files with all metadata. These are then to be automatically rendered into other formats as needed. This is done to allow easier storing of the material, tracking of changes, versioning, and automatic bundling of different contents without having to deal with multiple versions of .pptx or .docx files.

You may be interested in the following relevant practices for teaching material.

Licensing

All teaching material meant to be open access must always be associated with a license, to clarify what are the legal restrictions (if any) in using, sharing and/or modifying the teaching material. All images, graphs, media included in the material must be included with their original license. If new images or graphs are created, they need to be licensed individually. The license that applies to the entire set of material must not be more permissive than the license that applies to any single piece included in it.

For more information, see the Licensing Practice

Workflow

Workflows help with executing, reusing and reproducing, as well as reporting all steps needed to create and update teaching material.

For more information, see the Workflow practice

Version control

Version control keeps track of changes and modifications to the teaching material, ensures that each new modification is traceable through a unique ID and allows the teachers to move seamlessly between versions (current and past), with no risk of losing information.

For more information, see the Version Control practice

Metadata

Metadata provides a basic set of information meant to support the retrievability of specific outputs and their correct citation.

Metadata for teaching material must include the following:

Attributions (who the authors/contributors are, who did the work on creating, reviewing, revising, updating the teaching material)
Licensing clarifying under what conditions/rules the teaching material can be used/modified/shared, etc.

In addition, metadata should also include the following:

Referencing to source material, to provide information regarding where the concepts, quotes, images or other contents come from.

Finally, descriptive tags may be added to each piece of teaching material, to allow its faster identification among the larger set of material and to enable new users to filter out and reuse it.

For more information, see the Metadata practice

Referencing

Original sources of images, graphs and other media, as well as concepts directly reported must be properly documented and cited.

For more information, see the Referencing practice

Attribution

All contributors i.e. people involved in creating, reviewing, revising, updating the teaching material - must be acknowledged, including their affiliation and, if applicable, ORCID (see orcid.org)

For more information, see the Attribution practice

Release

Semantic versioning can be used to identify different versions of a piece of teaching material (e.g. an exercise that is revised every year can be successively published as version 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 after each annual major revision).

Releases must always be associated with a license and a unique identifier (e.g. DOI). A unique identifier will be associated with one and only one release (i.e. instance of the material). The unique identifier can be used to cite and attribute the teaching material. In order to obtain a unique identifier, the authors may upload each part of the material on knowledge repositories such as Zenodo.

For more information, see the Release practice