The Course Site offers an easy and powerful way for students and faculty to add and share content. You might ask students to write posts, participate in discussions, share documents, and work collaboratively on projects. You can also use the site to display important course information, collect student work, and provide feedback and grades.
If you created an associated Course Site during course creation, review this section to help you organize your site structure.
Posts and Pages
Posts and pages are the primary ways to add content to your site. Posts are used to publish more dynamic information, such as weekly updates, announcements, or student work. These are published in reverse chronological order on the homepage or blog section of your site. Pages are better for static content, such as your syllabus page, schedules, lists of resources or readings, or help materials.
Navigation
Navigation refers to the ways visitors to your site can move from one page to another within your site to find the information they need. The Course Site template comes with preset navigation that you may keep as is or build upon.
The main building blocks for your Site navigation are a custom menu, sidebar widgets, categories, and tags. If you have many posts, you will want to use categories and tags to make them sortable and more easily findable. You might also put additional content, such as links to a web conferencing app or library tools, in the course sidebar.
The first step in designing your navigation is to think about the kind of content you want to share with students and then organize or “chunk” these into top-level and sub-sections. It’s good practice to limit your top-level navigation sections.
Visual Customizations
You can customize your Course Site by choosing a theme. Each theme has a different look and feel. All available themes are accessible for screen readers and keyboard-only navigation, and include accessible color combinations. Most themes allow you to upload a header image to display at the top of your site. This could be your own image, an image with a Creative Commons license, or an image in the public domain.
Plugins and Widgets
Plugins and widgets add additional functionality to your Course Site. You can add plugins and widgets to your site through the Dashboard.
For more information:
- Help > Building Blocks: Posts, pages, widgets, and, plugins
- Help > Change the menu on your site
- Help > Categories and tags
- Help > Create a post
- Help > Creating pages
- Help > Choose a theme
- Help > Changing your site’s header image
- Help > Activate plugins on your site
- Help > Add widgets to your site
This article is adapted from City Tech OpenLab Help, under a CC BY-NC-SA license.
