INTO Pre-sessional Course Materials Writing

Materials writing for SCORM packages produced using Evolve Authoring Tool and hosted on Moodle

• Responsibilities: Course writing, proofreading, checking for pedagogical value
• Target Audience: International university students
• Tools Used: Trello, MS Word, Wikipedia
• Year: 2020

Background

In April 2020 INTO had to move their pre-sessional courses online. A team of teacher trainers from NILE with online experience was brought in to help produce suitable materials.

Communication

There were two videoconference meetings a day using Lifesize Cloud to make sure everyone was on the same page and to allow people to bring up questions or problems.

Our group from NILE also made a Whatsapp group so that we could coordinate and help each other with specific questions.

Trello was used to assign work and keep track of progress. Instructional Designers were able to take our work from the board and start building it when we were finished.

Writing

The course was based on a textbook, which we could not reproduce online for copyright reasons. We therefore had to write our own readings, exercises, or comprehension questions to complement the book. For texts, we rewrote texts from copyright-free sources such as Wikipedia or copyright-free Youtube videos.

Proofreading

At the end of the project we were assigned to check the materials written by the teachers from INTO and make a note of typos and any pedagogical issues – for example, some comprehension questions did not require reading of the text to be answered.

I also checked the Scheme Of Work. This was a Google Doc and many people had contributed to it so I had to make sure it was internally consistent and also check it against the coursebook and written materials.