Blog archives

Q: Are there guidelines to help us improve the likelihood that the materials we created will be reused by others?

Answer: Yes.

The SkillsCommons Support Services Center provides some design and packaging guidelines for authoring and organizing your instructional materials to help others reuse your materials.

Please visit our Enabling Others to Reuse Your Materials page.

The SkillsCommons Support Services Center provides a resources guide to help you consider different ways of that your materials can be used because of the CC BY license.

Please visit our Reuse & Revise Open Educational Resources page.

Q: Are there guidelines to help assure the quality of the instructional design of materials?

Answer: Yes. Please visit our Assuring the Quality of Online & Hybrid Courses page.

The SkillsCommons Support Services Center provides information, evaluation rubrics, and access to experts that can support your team design high quality teaching and learning within online and hybrid courses. The California State University has organized all these sources for you to use as a “one-stop-shop” for information about quality assurance strategies for online and hybrid courses. The California State University also has developed and implemented a free quality assurance evaluation rubric for online and hybrid courses (Quality Online Learning and Teaching, QOLT) over the last 4 years that you can use to guide and assess the quality of your courses.

There are nationally recognized quality assurance organizations that you can join to support designing quality instruction into your programs. These organizations provides excellent professional development programs and well-researched and reliable rubrics for evaluating the quality of online and hybrid courses.

Q: Are there guidelines to help satisfy the accessibility and Universal Design for Learning (UDL) requirements?

Answer: If your project is required to ensure that all people, including those with disabilities have equally effective access to the instructional materials.   The SkillsCommons Support Services Center provides resources guides and websites that provide you some basic support for addressing the accessibility requirements of commonly used file formats and resources to help ensure you apply the principles of Universal Design for Learning to the materials you have created.

Please visit our Accessibility Requirements page to learn how to satisfy accessibility requirements.

Please visit our Accessibility & SkillsCommons page to learn about our accessibility support strategy.

Q: Are there resources that will help us prepare our materials before we upload?

Answer: Yes. Please visit our Prepare Your Materials page to learn how to best prepare your materials before you upload them into the repository.

Q: Are there Training Resources available for the SkillsCommon content upload process (Video tutorials, PowerPoint presentations, Webinars etc.)?

Answer: Yes, please visit our Support Services Center for guides, tutorials, videos and much more.

If you would like to schedule a webinar please contact support@skillscommons.org.

Q: Are there manuals or “How To Guides” available for SkillsCommons?

Answer: Yes, please visit our Support Services Center for guides, videos, tutorials and manuals.