Creating Pedagogic Modules and Activities

The Project Goals: Linking Pedagogy and Content

The Pedagogic Service connects teaching materials to pedagogic methods in ways that ensure that faculty seeking teaching materials find pedagogic information and vice versa. Our goal is to create modules that address teaching methods of high interest to faculty and link them with examples illustrating the use of those methods in the classes they teach.

Examples

Our research indicates that the examples play a critical role in bridging between the work that faculty do on a daily basis that motivates their interest in teaching methods and educational writing on the use of the methods more broadly. Example pages that contain activities are created along with the module, and follow-up activities can be submitted via the Activity Submission Form. More on Authoring Activites

Modules

Modules put forward information on the teaching methods in language that speaks to faculty. The most popular part of every module is the How section which gives practical advice on the use of the method. We emphasize references to the educational literature in the modules as a way of engaging faculty in the scholarly work that supports effective teaching and learning.More on Authoring Modules

Writing for the Web

Audience

As an module or activity author, the primary audience for your webpages are faculty - those in your discipline and those in other fields of science,social science, engineering, mathematics and technology. Our users also includes faculty in the humanities, K-12 teachers, and students at all levels.

Looking not Reading

The most important distinction between writing for paper copy and for the web is that users read books while they look at websites. Studies show that users do not read through pages linearly, rather they look first at the the things that catch their eye (titles, headers, pictures and links). Users need to be lured in to reading by something interesting. To this end we encourage you to think about how a user will look at and move through your webpages to learn something. Nesting long descriptions behind pages that provide a quick overview is an important technique.

Bad Surprises

The largest source of frustration to users are links that take them to things they are not expecting. They don't mind clicking nearly as much as being surprised or disappointed by where they land. Thus, it is critical to place links in contexts that help the user understand where they are going.

Using the SERC Content Management System

You will create your module or activity in the SERC Content Mangement System (CMS). This web-based interface will allow you to create and edit your webpages in such a way that they can be incorporated in your site and shared with other projects across the country. You can find full instructions in our documentation

How Will You Know When You are Done?

We provide a checklist for authors as a guide for self-review that you can use to determine the readiness of your work for expert review.