Course Building - Adding Units and Content Items
Adding Units | Adding Content Items
.NExT brings significant improvements to the course building area where authors add units and content items to their course.
Units & Content Items
As with the older version of Teaching Solutions, to add content to your course, users select a Unit element in the left-hand-side navigation and click on the Author tab. From within the Author view, the buttons that used to say Add Units and Add Content Items have been replaced in .NExT with a single button that says Course Units & Items. Within Course Units & Items, there are now two buttons: Add Unit and Add Items. Choose Add Unit to add a unit to the course and Add Items to add content items to any unit in the course. Users no longer have to be in the unit where they want to add the content item in order to add a content item there. Users can add content items to any unit from within any unit's authoring pages.
To view all units and content items in a course, select the Course Units & Items tab in the Author mode of any Unit or Course Home. From within the resulting table, expand each unit to see the content items as well as the type of each content item in a unit.
Course Units & Items View
To rename a content item, go to the bottom of the Course Units & Items page, and choose the content item you wish to rename from the pull down menu. After selecting the content item to rename, you can edit the name as well as see in which units this content item currently exists. When you select to rename it, the name will be changed in all units where it is used.
Course Units & Items View: Rename Items Area
Adding Units
To add a unit, go to the Course Units & Items tab in the Author mode of any Unit or Course Home and click on Add Unit. From this page, you can enter the title of the unit. You can also specify whether you want the title to appear on the navigation bar and what type of unit you want to use. The ability to choose the type of unit is new to .NExT. You can choose from the following:
- Text/Multimedia: this will give you the Visual Editor to author or edit the unit page.
- Web Content Upload: this will give you the ability to upload HTML pages authored outside of the eCollege platform (see New Content Item Type: Web Content Upload for details).
- Microsoft Office Document: this will give you the ability to upload an MS Word, Excel or PowerPoint document and have it converted to HTML (see Updated Content Item Type: Microsoft Office Document for details) and displayed within the Unit content frame.
You can continue to add units to the course by clicking Save & Add Another Unit. This will allow you to create and edit the entire left-hand-side navigation tree from within a single screen. Earlier versions of Teaching Solutions require you to go back to a previous screen and choose Add Unit to add another unit.
Add Unit
Adding Content Items to a Unit
- Go to the Course Units & Items tab in the Author mode of any Unit or Course Home and choose Add Items.
- In a non-Content Manager course you can either choose to create a new content item with a new name or choose from one of the existing content item names (and types) in the pull down menu. In a Content Manager course, you have the option to either:
- Create a placeholder for new content item (for later creation).
- Pull in content you've already created in this course or another course via a content search mechanism.
- When creating a new content item (in either a Content Manager or non-Content Manager course) you are presented with a screen that asks you to name the new content item as well as select the type of content from the Item type dropdown list. Chose based on the desired type.
- The user can then choose to add the content item to one unit or to multiple units. To select multiple units from the list of all units, hold down the "CTRL" key while you click on the desired units.
- Optional: You can choose to assign the content item to a group, hide from students, and/or create a Dropbox basket at this point. You can always go back to the specific content item's Toolbox to edit these settings later.
Add Content Items
| Return to Top | Continue |