I'm not a teacher myself, but I have worked in the (European) animation industry for a period of over 15 years now, doing traditional, hand drawn key-animation for commercials and theatrical feature films. As a hobby, I've been dabbling a bit with Poser; as the industry is shifting towards 3D I'm planning to get to grips with that and check out Maya. As far as software for teaching animation goes, there's a nice little program called Aura, by NewTek, that uses a traditional approach to animation; you can handdraw your animation in it (best with a Wacom tablet), and it has a very handy Onion Skin function that emulates a real world light table, so that you can see several animation drawings at once. Professional animation productions have been created with this software - and it is a very fast tool to learn basics like bouncing balls and that sort of stuff. For 2D, Aura and Flash are probably good programs to consider; as far as 3D goes I have not enough experience to give too much of advise. As an animation tool I have been frustrated about Poser's limitations, even if it is a very fast tool for simple scenes. I have worked in studios where Maya was used, and while it should be a near-perfect animation tool, I have been told that it takes well over year's worth of extensive training to get to grips with the software itself. It will mostly depend on the goal of the course what your strategy should be. If it is basically meant to be a Know Your Software sort of training, better choose one tool and stick to that. If it is animation you are interested in, the choise of software is less important; probably best go for a program that doesn't have a steep learning curve, and instead focus on the basics of animation, being (natural) movement and acting skills. 2D books like Disney Animation; The Illusion Of Life by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, and The Animator's Survival Kit, by Richard Williams, are widely used throughout the industry, both 2D and 3D, and cover the basics of what animation really is all about; making things move in interesting and entertaining ways, and communicating ideas and emotions to the audience; basic musts for every character animator, whatever method or software used. Parts of the theory described in those books could be a solid base for your animation course. I learned animation on the job, snd the first director I worked for had the best possible method for me. Instead of telling me what to do, he would discuss scenes with me, making me aware of the problems, and forcing me to think about them and come up with solutions of my own. The basic principles such as arcs, spacing, pose to pose, etc, should be thaught, of course, but in my opinion the quality that determines a good animator is his ability to bring inventive solutions to creative problems, and to clearly communicate the main basic ideas of a scene in an entertaining way, rather than merely copying what has been done before. Good luck.