12 Days of Course Design

Check links and resources are up to date

Every time you have a course that you know learners will soon be accessing again, it’s important to look through the resources within the course as if you were doing it for the first time.

Very often URLs, links and references you added a year prior may cease to exist, their reference may change, and so on so forth. Reviewing the course content before renewing it guarantees users will not find any hurdles when going through the course you created for the first time.

Image source: https://www.pedalo.co.uk/awesome-404-error-pages/

Things to check:

• URLs - check that the destination website is still active and relevant. This can often be true of links to PDFs as well.
  
  
• Library resources - often resources used from the library have their own licence. Double check that you still have permission to share them.
  
  
• External media - this goes for videos (such as those on YouTube or Vimeo) or links to podcasts. Make sure that embedded content is displayed correctly and that it hasn't been removed from its source page.
  
  
• External tools - do they need to be reconfigured? Have you discovered a better tool in the time since you first implemented the tool?
  
  
• Open Content - do you still have permission to use the content in your course? Has the Creative Common licence changed?