Text documents can be an important part of any learning experience. So much of the materials used in a class are text documents, from a syllabus to a photocopied magazine article. In moving to the world of technology-enhanced teaching, there are many ways to take materials that exist in a paper or digital form and publish them online. When you consider how to publish your materials, it is important to think about your audience, how they’ll be using the materials and what advantages are offered by different publishing formats.

Text documents can be published online simply in Word format, allowing students to download and open the file on their computer. There are however a few other options, some allowing more flexibility, some less. Again, it’s important to consider the audience and how they’ll use the document.

The most popular options for formatting text documents are:
• Text File
• Word document
• HTML

A text file is just that, plain text. There’s not much else to it. Most anyone can read a text file and in most cases a scanned article will save as a text file (after using OCR Software). Text files are also editable, which may or may not be helpful to your academic objectives.

A Word document (doc file) is another acceptable way to save a file for web distribution. It has an advantage over a text file because it allows you to use special formatting such as tables, colors, bullets, etc. One caveat is that students must have an application to view Word documents in order to access the file. Most computer users have something that can do this, but you never know for sure. Like a text file, Word documents can be reformatted and edited by users.

An HTML document is essentially a webpage. As a webpage, it is able to hold tables, colors, bullets and a variety of typefaces. It also only relies on a web browser (ex. Internet Explorer) for viewing. This means that everyone with Internet access can view your HTML document.