When you were developing your previous edition, were there any activities or resources that you wanted to develop but ended up postponing? Revisions is the perfect time to revisit and revitalize your earlier ideas. Perhaps you started with third-party videos, and now you would like to record your own. Perhaps you want to make the quizzes more difficult by adding more questions. Or perhaps you have noticed students are struggling with a few concepts, and you want to develop some additional supporting materials, such as practice activities.
Next, explore how you could enhance your materials and benefit from our innovations. Take another look at our sample course and discover what activity types we may have added since you worked on your previous edition.
- How could the activity types and examples in our sample course be useful or inspirational to this new iteration of your project?
- Are there any exercise types or resources that seem newly applicable now that you’re revising and enhancing the material?
To access the sample course or discuss examples, check with your project editor.
To decide what additional new activities and resources you may need, examine new content areas while keeping in mind our best practices for developing Active Learning materials (see Quick Guide: Creating Active Learning Content). If you’re updating the corresponding manuscript, an addition of a sentence or two may not warrant the development of another activity, but the inclusion of several new paragraphs or an entire section might. The greater the amount of new subject matter you add to the revised text or course, the more new Active Learning resources and activities you may need.
Before jumping into creating additional activities and resources, consider what would best support your new material:
- For instance, should these new topics be supported with skill-builders, reinforced with third-party videos, or contextualized with original micro-lectures? Or should you support them with another activity type?
- Does any new content need to be covered by additional questions in the existing quiz or exam banks?
For each entirely new chapter or topic area you include, be sure to include similar activities and resources for it that align with those of the other chapters. This way, you guarantee your Active Learning materials are consistent throughout your revised project.
