Despite the range of functionalities available in most learning management systems (LMSs), faculty and institutions still find themselves looking to add content or tools not available in their LMS to meet instructional strategies or goals. For this reason, the Learning Systems and Technology (LS&T) team at the University of Central Florida (UCF) created a program called Materia that produces customizable widgets for an LMS. Each widget has an author interface, which allows the user to easily customize the content to meet pedagogical needs. Once created, the widget can be shared with students and other instructors. Materia has been designed to work with any Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI)–compliant LMS and currently works seamlessly with Canvas. Best of all, the Materia platform is available under the Affero General Public License, which means any institution can use it free of charge. Feel free to learn how to implement Materia at your institution.
