At the planning stage, you might want to think about staffing, guest speakers, technical and support staff, materials and resources, and equipment.
What other staff might be involved? (E.g. technical and administrative support staff.) Are there other teaching staff with whom you need to relate? Is there a risk relating to other instructors teaching part of the program? Are you working with other people who might not be able to show up or who might not be able to do their job adequately? (e.g. they are still learning the job). What arrangements are there for assessment in technical areas?
Units driven by textbook
There is actually nothing wrong with using a textbook as the basis for a unit. For some units, a standard text containing workbook sections might be the best possible approach.
As a rule, don't just ask students to read it. Give them activities that make them read it for a focused purpose.
Several guidelines normally apply:
Perhaps you've already found the resources and materials that you will use, and you have a suitable textbook. Perhaps you shouldn't develop any new materials at all.
However, you might need to add some of your own, for example:
Your materials need to be clear and understandable, and must comply with copyright regulations. The latter particularly applies if you develop reading folders of photocopied material. If costs are a factor, you should identify costs and gain approvals.
In your planning, don't forget the simple blackboard or whiteboard. Although few regret the passing of chalk 'n' talk,
it sad that blackboard skills have declined.
Keep records of large, simple diagrams and whiteboard exercises that make the best use of whiteboard space and illustrate your point most aptly.
What facilities will you need? Are approvals necessary? Do you need to check that the room and equipment is scheduled? Is funding an issue? Specific facility, technology or equipment needs can include:
Will you be ready on time? Will you have all learning materials (and anything else you need) finalized and organized in time to start teaching?
Think about possible costs, and logistics. Costs may be:
Logistical factors may be:
Clarify your time allocation for training sessions. How many sessions are available? How long will each one be?
What kinds of support will students need? If it's needed, it’s your job to arrange it. It may be as simple as deliberate availability for individual help, but it may be much more. Extra tutorials? Extra time with specialized equipment?
Perhaps you cannot give the necessary support yourself and need to arrange for support personnel, such as:
You need to know something about copyright, whether developing your own materials or using materials from other sources. Copyright varies in different parts of the world.
What does copyright protect? Copyright protects:
How long does copyright last? Copyright now expires 70 years after the death of the author. (It used to be 50 years.)
Are all copyright rules the same? No. Images, music and electronic media have different copyright rules. There are also other kinds of intellectual property such as patents, plant breeds, designs, circuit layouts, and trade marks.
What doesn't copyright protect? Copyright applies to the text and does not extend to the ideas, concepts, styles, techniques or information. Names, titles, slogans and headlines are too small or unoriginal to be protected by copyright.
However, some of these may still be protected by other intellectual property laws:
In any case, if you use the ideas in academic work and express them in your own words, you need to provide references to avoid plagiarism. (You can plagiarize without infringing copyright.)
What if it doesn't follow the exact text? One could contravene copyright by making a paraphrase of something or a revised later edition. It is demonstrably still the same work. A novel using exactly the same plot and characters would also fall under this category even if it did not use the exact same text.
What do you have to do to get copyright for your work? Protection is free and automatic from the time something is first written or recorded. There is no registration for copyright protection in Australia. The copyright notice does not need to be on something to gain protection, but it is a good reminder (e.g. © Joe Blow 1973)
Educational institutions have special provisions to use copyright material for educational purposes without the permission of the copyright owner. Some of these provisions allow material to be used for free and others require payment.
The Copyright Act also provides some exceptions to the general rules regarding copyright. The most important of these permits 'fair dealing' for the following purposes:
This is no general exception for personal copying. It must be for one of the specified purposes.
What can you do? You can make single or multiple copies for students as follows:
Books Up to 10% of the pages of a book of ten or more pages or one chapter including any illustrations accompanying the text
Periodicals One or more articles in each issue on the same subject matter
Journal articles A single copy of a journal article
Electronic materials 10% of the number of words in a work that is in electronic form
Anthologies Up to 10% of the pages or one article provided:
Out of print works
What you can't do. You can't sell copies to students or anyone else under any circumstances at all.