The internet offers a massive amount of content for teachers and learners to choose from. This page lists a few of our favorite (mostly free) resources to consider as you search for teaching materials.
Hoopla
hoopla is a free service offered by your local public library that allows you to borrow movies, music, audiobooks, ebooks, and TV shows to enjoy on your computer, tablet, or phone – and even your TV! With no waiting, titles can be streamed immediately or downloaded to phones or tablets. Hoopla has hundreds of thousands of titles to choose from, with more being added daily. hoopla is like having your public library at your fingertips.
If you don’t already have an ID card from your local library, sign-up for a free Boston Public Library e-card which can be used to sign-up for hoopla. Massachusetts residents and students attending a school in Massachusetts qualify for a library card.
Kanopy
Kanopy provides access to more than 26,000 films at over 3,000 higher education campuses worldwide. Titles are searchable through Primo, our discovery system, and through the Kanopy website. Titles can easily be linked to in MyCourses in their entirety or as custom clips you create.
Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, etc.
Mainstream streaming services are a great place for instructors to find movies, television, and audio content. Although most of these services come at a cost to students, most also offer generous free trials and discounts exclusively to students. If you only need your students to watch 1-2 videos on a service, the free trial may offer students enough time to watch the videos and never have to pay. Another benefit of these services is that all of their videos are closed-captioned.
- Netflix – 30-day trial, $8.99/mo thereafter.
- Hulu/Spotify/Showtime bundle – 3-month student trial, $4.99/mo thereafter.
- Amazon Prime Student – 6-month student trial, $6.49/mo thereafter. Includes Prime Video, Music, and 2-day shipping benefits.
- Tubi – Free, ad-supported television shows and movies.
LinkedIn Learning
LinkedIn Learning is an online training resource available to all members of the UMass Dartmouth community. In LinkedIn Learning, you can get answers to many of your “how do I do that?” questions about 200+ programs, such as Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop, Windows and Apple operating systems, and many more!
LinkedIn Learning videos can be shared with your students through a myCourses site or viewed under the “University Resources > Campus Systems” sub-section of the myUMassD portal.
Khan Academy
Khan Academy offers practice exercises and instructional videos that empower learners to study at their own pace in and outside of the classroom. They tackle math, science, technology, history, art history, economics, and more. Their math missions guide learners from kindergarten to calculus using state-of-the-art, adaptive technology that identifies strengths and learning gaps. They have also partnered with institutions like NASA, The Museum of Modern Art, The California Academy of Sciences, and MIT to offer specialized content.
UMass Dartmouth Instructional Media Gallery
The UMass Dartmouth Instructional Media Gallery is home to a collection of micro-lectures produced by UMass Dartmouth faculty and staff. These lectures are freely available and cover a variety of topics such as college-level writing, research, and various sciences. The gallery is hosted publicly on YouTube to allow easy sharing and embedding.
MERLOT
The MERLOT collection consists of tens of thousands of discipline-specific learning materials, learning exercises, and Content Builder web pages, together with associated comments, and bookmark collections, all intended to enhance the teaching experience of using a learning material. All of these items have been contributed by the MERLOT member community, who have either authored the materials themselves, or who have discovered the materials, found them useful, and wished to share their enthusiasm for the materials with others in the teaching and learning community.
All the materials in MERLOT are reviewed for suitability for retention in the collection. Many undergo the more extensive “peer review” for which MERLOT is famous.
PBS
PBS (Public Broadcasting Service) is a well-known television network that also maintains a robust online archive of programs previously aired on television. The PBS video archive primarily consists of documentaries and local programs accompanied by a modest selection of original programming. Their collection of documentaries explores topics such as culture, arts, history, current events, science, and nature.
YouTube
YouTube offers a wide array of videos ranging from professionally produced shows to videos recorded by everyday people using their smartphones. Unlike other repositories on this page, YouTube videos are typically not organized into collections or playlists related to specific topics. Instead, YouTube is a place to search when you already have a topic in mind that you would like to supplement using video. myCourses even offers a direct integration with YouTube that allows you to search and pull videos directly into your myCourses sites.
Note: Not every video on YouTube is captioned. Be sure to use the gear icon along the bottom of a video to ensure that English captions (not auto-generated) are available for videos you share with your students.
The video below is a recording of a session presented by Instructional Development titled “Instructional Media Repositories.”