The first step to prepare a new course is to create a new course in the CMS. To create a linear course one has to navigate to the ‘Courses’ page. To create a new linear course select ‘linear course’ as option as option from the two radio buttons and press the ‘Create new course’ button. This will open a ‘New Course’ form. In this form the instructor can specify a course name and course description, as well as assigning which student roles are allowed to access the newly created course.
On this page there is also a drop-down menu with an overview of already created courses under ‘Available courses’ in case the course is already created. Courses that were already created earlier can be edited this way. For example when an instructor wants to add an extra role to a course or the course name has to be different.
The ID is generated by the CMS itself. It is mostly used internally by our software to keep track of all courses. The course name and description can be provided by the instructors. Students will see this name also in the app, on the course dashboard where all courses available for the logged in student are listed. After a student selects a course, more information about this course appears, so that’s where the student can read the description.
Four course modes can be specified:
- Student’s choice (the student gets to choose the course mode inside the app)
- Learning (highlights the correct answer)
- Training (highlights the correct answer after the student picked one)
- Examination (student sees no feedback concerning the correctness)
Also a passing score has to be specified. The ‘Pass score’ is the minimum score of correct answers required for a student to pass the course. The instructor can determine a specific ‘question score’ for every question. For every correct answer these question scores are added up.. So, for example, if every question has a question score of 10 and a student needs to pass 6 out of 10 available questions, the pass score has to be set to 60 (out of a 100).
Roles are important. They are used to specify which (group of) students can see and take the course in the app after they logged in. Roles can be created in the CMS and one or more roles can be assigned to each individual student. In the ‘Assigning courses to students‘ section, the set up of roles and how they connect students and courses is further explained.
Once the form has been filled correctly, press the ‘Save button’. This will reload the page and the newly created course is visible. Now everything is ready to start assigning questions to the linear course. That will be explained in the next section.
Note: created courses can also be deleted by pressing the recycle bin button on the right. As the media and questions are made separately in the CMS from a course, unintentionally deleting a course is less catastrophic in terms of data loss than when deleting a non-linear course.
Adding questions to a linear course
The content of a linear course comes from the questions assigned to the course. These questions first need to be created before they can be assigned obviously. Go to the ‘Course questions’ page (one of the three big buttons at the top of the linear course form).
Here the created linear course can be selected and a list of available linear questions appear. From this list of available questions, the relevant ones for the course can be selected by moving them over into the Selected questions list with the arrow keys between the two lists. If a question needs to be removed from the course, simply select the question in ‘Selected questions’ and press the delete button on the right. Note that the list of available questions also allows questions to be reused in multiple linear courses, if needed.
The order of the questions can also be determined with the move up or move down buttons on the right of the Selected questions. Select a question and press move up or move down to change the linear sequence of questions.
Note: due to continuous development, the ‘Course questions’ page as seen in the video can be found as a button on the linear course page instead of the side menu.
