The Content tool is used to design, create, organize and share course content materials for students and other site participants. Instructors may create text based content, share links to external sources, upload downloadable documents and link to other tools and features within the site. Lesson content can include simple text to multimedia assets, like embedded audio files and video files. The design and function possibilities are vast! Here’s a general overview of the Content Tool Features.
Creating Spaces for Course Content:
Step 1: Go to Content Tool
Step 2: Click on “New Unit”
Your Page(s) are now ready for “Adding Content to Units (pages):”
Organize Course Content:
In the Content tool use “Units” to keep related course resources, activities, and content together in one place. For instance you can create a Unit called “Site Resources” and upload all course readings to that folder. Likewise you can name a folder “Unit 1: Poetry” and compile all relevant activities, tasks and assessments to the folder (see picture below).
The most common practice in organizing Course Content is to organize content Units, by Topic unit or by Term week (i.e. Week 7). You may also want to consider creating “sub-units” to further organize course content into applicable themes or tasks. I.e. create a sub unit titled “To do” and compile tasks and resources in this space for easy access.
Here are some examples of how content units (pages) might be organized:
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Tip: Units can have sub ‘folders’. You can ‘Create New’ > New Lesson to create a sub page. In the New Lesson you can ‘Create New’ > New Folder. Units are restricted to three tiers or levels of Units, lessons and folders. You cannot have unlimited sub lessons and folders. |
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Tip: Major Content Units (or folders) have a dark red folder colour, whereas sub-units are indented and have a lighter red colour. |
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Adding course materials to a unit is very easy on Brightspace. You can drag and drop content from your computer (i.e. links, documents etc.), and you can also use the Add Exisiting or Create New buttons to add content as well.
Click Create New to create text pages (HTML Documents), add links and more (see picture below).
Click Add Existing to share learning objects that exist within the site already.
Add Existing Material in Brightspace
Modifying Content Items
Instructors can modify all content items after they have been published to the content tool. Instructors can control visibility of the tool, and can Edit the item, add or edit Release conditions, they can post to the Homepage, Download, Publish as Learning Object Repository (LOR), reassign it’s unit location and delete the file.
