Add and organise curriculum materials

What materials do

When you add a document to an activity, the tutor can use it — ground its answers in your source rather than in general knowledge. You can add:

• documents from the shared library — material already available to you, and
• your own uploads — a PDF, slides, a worksheet, notes, or an image.

For each document you choose whether students can open it (otherwise only the tutor uses it), and whether the tutor reads the whole text every time or looks it up when relevant.

Step 1 — Open the Materials section

Open an activity for editing (or create one — guide T2) and scroll to Materials, or pick it in the section navigation. The section lists the documents chosen for this activity, one row each. With none chosen yet, it says so.

Step 2 — Add a document

Select Add document. It opens the library, with a search box, a Filter button and Upload a file. You have two ways to add material:

• Pick from the library. Type in the search box, or open Filter to narrow by Subject, Folders, Level and Tags (the button shows how many filters are on, and the active ones stay visible as chips). Select Use in activity on a document's row; it then reads Added and the document joins the activity's list.
• Upload your own. Select Upload a file and choose a file (PDF, Word, slides, spreadsheet, plain text, or an image). A document is added to the activity straight away, and AIPLA shows you what it extracted, so you can confirm it was read correctly before relying on it. An image is not text-extracted — the tutor sees the picture itself; save the activity once before uploading one.

Select Done to close the library.

Step 3 — Choose what students can open

Each chosen document has one checkbox: Students can open it. New documents start unticked: the tutor still uses the document, but students cannot open it, and the row says only the tutor uses it. Tick the box only when you want students to read the source directly; the document then also appears in their workspace. When the tutor names a shared document, the name is a link that opens it; it never links to one students cannot open.

The first document students can open is already open when they arrive, and tabs switch to the others; its row says opens first for students. The order is the order you added them in.

The row's ⋯ menu holds the rarer choices:

• Open this first for students — moves the document to the front (and lets students open it).
• Let the tutor read the whole text every time — for the task your students are working on, so the tutor never has to search for it or ask them to paste it in. The row then says the tutor reads the whole text. Let the tutor look it up when relevant switches back; that is the default, and it suits a textbook or reference work.
• See what was extracted — the text AIPLA read from the file.
• Remove from this activity — the document stays in the library. Removing an image asks first, because the image is deleted.

Step 4 — Organise: folders, tags and subject

Keep a growing library easy to search. Each document's ⋯ in the library holds:

• Organise (subject, folder, tags) — set its subject, folder and tags, so the filters can find it later. Select Done when you have finished.
• Put in a new folder… — create a folder and file the document in it (for your own documents).
• Delete from the library… — asks first.

Folders also appear under Filter → Folders, with New folder at the end of the row; deleting a folder unfiles its documents rather than deleting them.

An upload is filed into whatever subject and folder you are filtered to at the time. Organisation on the shared library is shared, so a document you tag well is easier for you and your colleagues to reuse across activities. Your own uploads stay in your own library; only researchers can add an upload to the shared library.

Next steps

• Let the AI helper assemble an activity — including suggested materials — from a description: T4 — Author with the AI co-pilot.