How to lay out a course.
As a teacher, you have a lot of control over how you rcourse appears to your students
for example if your institution allows, you can change the full name of the course
which is written in large
here, and the shortname of the course which appears in the navigation bar.
you can also change the format - how your resources and activities are
displayed.
Thisis course has numbered topics for example
which can be renamed, as we'll see later.
Many of the changes you can make can be done by going to the administration
block
which is here on the right, and by clicking
Edit Settings. This takes you to the set up screen of
your course where you can change if you need to,
its full name and it
and its shortname and again, if allowed by your institution, the category
in which it appears.
You can hide it until you're ready and set a course date.
You can add a description of your course for students who aren't yet enrolled
and if you wish you can upload a file
for example an image giving information about your course.
If we click Course format, this is where we can choose how we'd like the
resources to be displayed.
Topics gives us numbered topic sections
and we can choose a number of sections.
Here we can also select to have Weekly format where the sections are named as
weeks,
Social format which is basically one big message board
just for discussing,or Single activity format which would allow you to add just
one particular item such as SCORM package or a quiz.
If we choose topics or weekly format we can then decide whether we want to show
all the sections on one page, which is what we will do,
which is the norm, but if you think you are going to have a lot of sections
and that would cause some scrolling, you can choose to show only one section per
page.
This has an effect on how your students view your course
as we can see here in this course,
"Types of Sport".
The first time you access it you, can see each of the sections
and then greyed out on the right the activities which are in those sections.
If you then click the link on the section, for example our second section, Tennis,
the student will then only see the activities in that particular section
and they will navigate to the other sections by clicking the name
in the section on the right or the left
or by going to the "Jump to.." menu
and selecting from there.
So this might be useful if you think your course will have a lot of sections.
Clicking Appearance will allow you then
to decide how many news items in your News forum you want to show. The News forum
is simply for announcements and it isn't a discussion forum
If you set it to zero you can then delete the News forum if you don't think it will be useful
to you.
Other options can be found by clicking on them and expanding them
for example if you click Role renaming
if you don't want to call your students students
but you have a different name - " learners" for instance-
then you can change the name here and that will appear
just in your course.
If we now click Save Changes, in the next video
we will turn on the editing we can look at the changes we can make to our course,
for example how to rename the sections.