“Source Courses” and Effective Content Editing

Typically, you’d only want one "source course" for each distinctive course you teach, not for each section. This approach saves you work because updates are made to a single source course (ANGEL’s name for a course development shell).

You can place learning objects (pages of content, images, assessments and so on) in your personal Learning Object Repository (LOR) and then link or copy from the LOR to each source course or production course. By using this approach, you avoid having the same content stored in multiple places in such a way as to require you to update the content in multiple places. If/when you need to make a correction or addition, you make the change in the LOR and if that content is linked to multiple courses, the changes ripple through all those linked courses. There is at least one caveat to this approach: anything that is graded (such as assessments and assignments) must be copied from the LOR rather than linked, but having the original in one location still saves you time because you can copy to multiple courses semester after semester.

Note that the source course is not the course shell you’ll teach from. These are only the shells in which you build your course. Later you’ll copy the entire source course to one or more production courses. If you teach multiple versions of the same course (online, face-to-face or self-paced) and the content is basically the same, you will find it far easier to include all information for the course in a single source course, copy that content to the different sections you’ll teach and then just delete any content that is not specific to each section. That will be far easier than trying to add updates to multiple source courses and keeping straight what you need to change or what has already been changed.

Generally, we suggest you use a single source course for each distinct course you teach, unless the content is dramatically different between sections of the course (e.g., different textbooks, different content and so on). You’ll be able to manage course materials with less effort by following this approach.