Managing Resources

Course Design Tools Help

Managing Resources

There are always more articles, books, podcasts, films and images than what we can realistically include in a single course, but that we’d still like to share with students. These additional resources are important, especially for students who want to learn more but may not be sure where to start looking. 

Resource management and thoughtful curation are useful not only in managing instructor resources, but also as a possible exercise for students themselves, individually or in groups, to practice their digital literacy skills as well as honing their critical thinking in identifying, filtering, and organizing material for research and further study. 

So what can we do to help students easily access more resources? There are a number of ways to successfully manage resources.

In the Core Template

bCourses is your best option for collecting and sharing course resources with your students. The DLS Core Template provides a structure for organizing your materials by week, providing them on a single weekly landing page. The weekly landing page is organized in a regular pattern so students can anticipate where to find readings, lectures, and additional resources. When using these weekly landing pages, be sure to include the name of the resource, the link where students can find it, why you're suggesting it, and in what way the resource is relevant to the course.

You can use the Files section of your course site to store and organize materials such as reading assignments that you'd like to provide to students. Learn more about how to organize your Files section and provide files to students via weekly landing pages in the resource Add Reading Assignments to Weekly Landing Pages.   

Curation

Curation is the process of finding, collecting, organizing, and filtering of information into a refined presentation, and in a way that helps students access relevant material quickly and easily.

Within bCourses, you can use the Asset Library to curate and share resources in a visual layout. The Asset Library consists of a thumbnail-view, infinite-scroll mediafeed where students and instructors can post and view media. Students can like, comment, and track views on posted media, as well as use a web clipper to browse the web and curate media back into the Asset Library while maintaining a link to the original web source. The Asset Library is part of SuiteC, a UC Berkeley-developed tool that also includes the Whiteboard and Engagement Index tools. See resources below for more information about SuiteC

In addition to SuiteC, the following examples highlight other free, online curation tools that you can link to from your bCourses site, or simply recommend to your students.

  • Scoop.it allows users to create and share their own themed magazines designed around a given topic.
  • Curator.io is a free social media aggregator that automatically updates all accounts included in a given feed.
  • Pinterest is a pinboard-style photo/link sharing site. The service allows users to create and manage theme-based image collections linked out to sites of origin.

Resources

Examples of Curation Tools

Articles on Curation in the Classroom

DLS Core Template

SuiteC