What They Are

By didactic materials we understand sets of content and of methodological and didactic resources (such as activities involving self-teaching or evaluation, etc.) organised according to a set of objectives and geared towards facilitating the student's learning process.

From a pedagogical standpoint, didactic materials must constitute an instrument, a resource or a means to help to understand content, to attain objectives, and to acquire skills. They should also motivate students and communicate content in such a way as to facilitate comprehension.

At the UOC and to date, these concepts have materialised basically in two types of didactic material, namely, those in paper support and those in digital support, integrating two or more media (also known as multimedia didactic materials).

How They Are Elaborated

At the UOC, the elaboration of didactic material is carried out in the way described in the following diagram:

The UOC needs to create material for a subject. The professor responsible defines what type of materials they want and what characteristics they have to have. They conceptualise the materials, produce the table of contents and decide what they should be like.

Certain requirements and guides arise from this (the style guide for teaching materials, the technological design guide for teaching materials, etc.). Subsequently, where appropriate, the necessary resources are produced to make the materials work (such as browser, search engine or glossary resources, elements that allow video and sound to be watched and heard); likewise, where necessary, a model is produced that includes all these resources.

The publisher is in charge of collating the contents from the authors, carrying out the various reviews and producing the teaching materials from the guides, contents and model (if there is one).

The professor responsible has to find the authors and coordinate the work of all of them to produce the final format.

Types of Materials

Whether on paper or as digital media, the teaching materials are based on the knowledge of the professor responsible for the subject.

Materials on Paper

The production of materials is based on the content received from the author and in the Scriptorium. The Scriptorium is produced by the UOC and is a guide to the editing of printed teaching materials and for the covers and labels of complementary materials, such as videos, CD-ROM, disks, etc.

Concerning paper materials, the most noteworthy thing from the technical point of view is that in most cases they are printed digitally (directly from Postscript). This makes it possible to produce the content with greater flexibility and speed.

Multimedia Materials

		The format must be HTML, as it a language which formats information in a way that everyone can view it through their web browsers.
		Materials should comply with the requirements detailed in the Style Book for Multimedia Didactic Materials, a guide created by the UOC describing the guidelines of graphic design involving multimedia didactic materials.
		Materials should follow the indications outlined in the Technological Design of Multimedia Didactic Materials. This periodically-updated guide is a compilation of the set of technological criteria which make it possible for materials to comply with the requirements outlined above. IN addition, the guide brings together a collection of resources which also are elaborated at the UOC. These implement the various functions offered by multimedia didactic materials, such as a browsing system, a glossary, a search engine, video and sound players, a general index, etc. These resources are usually Java applets or JavaScript libraries.