An adapted excerpt from Google Course Builder

 

 

Optional course material

You can address differences in students' abilities. The primary course materials (e.g. lessons, activities, and assessments) should be designed for the "average" student.

However, you can offer optional material to some students. For example, you can have background reading for students who need a little extra help getting started. You can also offer more advanced material for students who want more challenging activities to strengthen their knowledge of the main materials. You can have material about aspects of the topic not covered at all in the main materials for students who want to explore more.

This has several other major effects:

• It keep the focus on the primary material.
• Some kinds of finite materials can limit what is available for high flyers to learn. Optional course materials tend to reduce those limitations.
• Optional course materials also prepare hight flyers for study at the next level up.
• Optional course materials give weaker students a reasonable change of passing.

You have several options for creating your optional material, depending on your goals for it.

For optional, more challenging, activities, you might choose to post these to your web forum. The advantage of this approach is that you can then encourage your students to post their answers and discuss those answers among themselves.

Choose carefully the medium for optional material. It is not difficult to provide extra readings, but separate kinds of interactive tasks can consume disproportionate amounts of your time. For example, it is easy to give much more time to your brightest students. This brings up an ethical consideration. You need to allocate your attention and time in an equitable way that gives all your students a resonalble chance of passing.