Compiling and Consolidating Course Assets

Taking over a course from another teacher can be a challenge.

It took me a while to review all the old material and get my head around how the course was structured, but now I’ve fully unpacked it and I’ve started to rebuilding it, putting my own mark on things as I go. I’ve identified gaps and opportunities to make improvements, and I’ve started to put it back together in a way that I’m happy with.

My development of this course will be a never ending iterative process, based around the Agile Software Development methodology. Something like:

Once I’d determined the direction of the course, I had to think about how I would present it. My key concerns were:

My school used Canvas LMS, so originally the course was mostly built using Canvas Assignment, Quizzes, and Pages. This is fine, but it isn’t as portable and easy to update as I’d like. Also, I’ve been burnt in the past by using LMS specific tools when migrating to a different LMS.

So after lots of thought, I decided to create my Assessment Tools and Learning Resources in Microsoft Word. Yep, you read correctly: Word Documents. This felt completely crazy at first. I’ve been teaching online courses for well over a decade using a range of eLearning tools, so just putting Word Documents online felt like a cop out. But hear me out…

The word documents seemed to meet my criteria:

Quizzes posed a challenge, so I am continuing to use Canvas Quizzes, but exporting the questions to PDF so they can be part of this process. Students still take the Quizzes online, as they normally would.

So, what I ended up with for each unit in the course was something like this:

This meant 10 or more Word Documents for each unit.

This was fine for Canvas; I’d just create a “Module” for each unit and put the documents there in Canvas Pages or Canvas Assignments, but it’s a little unwieldy for sharing a whole unit with colleges.

I thought it would be cool to be able to somehow compile all the Word Documents into one PDF file to create an Assessment Package for an entire unit. That way I could provide everything needed for the unit in one file, in the correct order, in a consistent format. This would make it easy to share with other teachers at moderation and validation meetings, and also make a nice little ‘work book’ for students to print out if needed.

I started writing some code that would compile Word Documents and PDFs together into one PDF file. There’s other software out there that that can merge PDFs, but I wanted this to be really simple for me to use.

I ended up creating a program that:

The result is a PDF that contains everything needed for the assessment of a unit of competence.

This journey of continuous improvement will never end, but hopefully I’m making it easy for myself to develop and maintain a quality product.

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