Mapping curriculum to core and peripheral skills

- [Voiceover] A great first step to using Lynda.com in the classroom, is to map Lynda.com courses, or figure out which Lynda.com courses align to your teaching objectives. Now, there's several ways to do this. The first way to get started is to simply come up to the Library button, and hover on it. Here, on the left-hand side of the navigation, I can see all of the main segments at Lynda.com, and this is a great starting point to figure out if we have content that's 100% aligned to your teaching objectives. For example, if you're teaching a web course, we can come down to web, and then see there's a variety of topics, including things such as Web Development, Web Design, and even User Experience.

If we find a topic that's right, so for example, here I have CSS Fundamentals, and perhaps you teach CSS as part of a web design course that you're teaching, the next step is to figure out, how does this content align to the learning objectives of your course? A great place to start, and no matter what movie you're clicked on, you can view this information, is on the Overview tab that's directly below the player window. Now, this Overview tab is gonna give you information about the course itself. It's gonna have both a description of the course, as well as maybe a breakdown of topics that this course is gonna include.

Now, keep in mind however, that this course is fairly long, and so we may want to be more specific with our mapping. We may want to find exact movies that meet what we're trying to teach our students. So, for example, let's say that you have a lesson built into your syllabus that's on teaching students how to change colors with CSS. Well, we can actually search directly inside of this course. Right on the Contents tab, there's a Search This Course field, and in this field I'm just gonna go and type the word color, and then hit enter. What I'm now seeing is anytime that the word color is used in the video titles or the transcript inside of this course.

So, for example, right here we've got a video title that's called Working with Color, and inside of that I can see how colors being used, and defined inside of this video. If this is gonna work for what I'm hoping to do, I can simply click on one of these search results... - [Video Speaker] It really concentrates on how... - [Voiceover] And, it's gonna jump me to that exact part of this Lynda.com video, so I can quickly watch it, and figure out if it exactly aligns to what I'm hoping to teach my students. Taking the time to go through your syllabus, and find what Lynda.com courses align to your learning objectives, will really prepare your students for success, even if you aren't using Lynda.com to teach them, they'll now have a secondary resource they can reference if they need some additional time with the material.

If you don't find a Lynda.com course that directly aligns to your core subject matter, there's still ways to use this with your students, and I highly recommend you take the time to think about what peripheral skills do your students need to be successful. A great place to start is to come over, and take a look at the Student Tools landing page. You can find this by going to Library, navigating to Education and Elearning, and selecting Student Tools. Under this tab, there's a collection of courses that are designed to help students be successful as they move through an academic career. Another great place to check is in the Business Library.

If you go to Library, select Business, there's a variety of topics to allow people to be successful in the workforce, and as such, these skills translate down to the classroom. I've opened a few tabs to show you a place that I've found a lot of content that's been relevant for students. Presentation skills, leadership skills, communication skills, as well as training on the office suite of applications, such as PowerPoint, and Microsoft Word. Now, mapping Lynda.com videos to your curriculum can be a little bit time consuming, but you only have to do it once, and you can reuse this mapping from quarter to quarter.

However, one thing that I would point out, is that Lynda.com courses do often update. Please keep an eye out for additional courses, and maybe every quarter, spot check your mapping to make sure you're still linking to the most recent Lynda.com courses.