Pages, or documents created outside of Beebop?

For many of us, the traditional approach to preparing a lecture has always been to create content on our computers using various applications, then saving this content as PDF or Powerpoint presentations, and finally uploading these files to our learning management system or to a cloud drive from where it can be shared with students and colleagues.

While Beebop can still be used as a container for links and files to download, a much better option would be to skip a few steps and create our content directly there as 'Pages' and 'Assignments', particularly if this content is something we expect to be using for more than one class.

The better way

The advantages of having Pages instead of external documents are many:

• For the Students
  

  • Pages are immediately readable – external files on the other hand have to be downloaded on a compatible device before they can be opened, and even when they can be previewed in the browser take a long time to display if there is a slow internet connection.

  • External files are not optimised for mobile devices: something that looks good on our desktop may be very difficult to read on a smaller screen without a great deal of zooming and scrolling.

  • Content is always automatically up to date; possible errors and broken links can be fixed before they are even noticed by the majority of the students, without the need to contact everyone and ask them to download a newer version again.

  • Pages offer consistent styling optimised for readability. Standardised fonts and text formatting allow for better accessibility for users with dyslexia, impaired vision, and give better results when printing.
    
    

• For the Authors
  

  • Pages and Assignments are very easy to maintain: any time we need to update a link, replace an image with a better one, improve a paragraph, all we have to do is login on Beebop from any device, update the Page, and this is instantly updated for all past, current and future students.

  • Any content saved as ‘Pages’ can also be easily turned into a PDF if we want to use them as slides during our lectures; we can even add ‘page breaks’ to have better control of what goes into each slide.

  • Avoid repetitive work, fewer things to manage, no duplicates: Pages are created only once and then used in multiple courses, year after year.
    The images, media, and other files included in a Page or Assignment can also be used in multiple other Pages and Assignments, without the need to upload multiple copies.
    Using tags and other search criteria we can easily find and maintain all our resources without the need to keep originals on our local computers.

  • Reusable media, Pages and Assignments use very little storage space on Beebop. On the other hand, external files and media uploaded multiple times can quickly consume all the storage allocated to a school’s account (the storage limit depends on each school’s licence).

  • Students are encouraged to visit Beebop daily to access their course content, which increases the chance of them participating in discussions, reading messages and notifications, and giving us the opportunity to track their engagement by analysing their use of Beebop.
    
    

One-off uploads

Having made the argument for creating Pages and Assignment as ‘the better option’, there are also situations where the opposite is true.

Often there will be magazine articles, images, research papers and other documents that we’d like to share with our current students, but which may be very topical and would not lend themselves to be used again and again in over the years.

In this case creating new Pages with their own title and tags, only to have them as containers for these external documents, would be a waste of time and cause unnecessary clutter in Beebop's list of Pages.

Instead, the best way to treat this kind of content is to create a new Post on the Class Discussion Channel where we can upload new files, images, media (as well as reusing files from our own Beebop Files) and add text just as we do in Pages to provide context and commentary.

All these files that we upload to a Post will also be added automatically to our own Beebop Files, so they can also be used again for future posts or even in Pages if we change our mind.

In Conclusion

Any time we have something to share with our students, we should ask ourselves the following questions:

1. Is this something I can use again next year without modifications?
   Can it be presented as a self-contained resource?
   
   – YES > Create a Page
   
   
2. If I want to include content created by someone else, is it worth reformatting this content within the Page and just providing credit to the original source as a link?
   
   – NO > Has this content already been uploaded on Beebop so it can be found in my Beebop Files?
   
   – NO > Upload the external File in the page, add original content around it.
   
   
3. Is it an external document I want to include in the course content for this and future classes for as long as it is relevant?
   
   – YES > Add to my Beebop Files, then edit my current class Notes to include this File in one of the Chapters.
   
   
4. Do I want to add comments or context for students to understand this external document?
   
   – YES > Put comments and more in a Post about this file in the Class Channel (which will also send a notification to all the students in this class)