Organize course content

Administrators can make the Courses folder in the Content Collection available to instructors, content designers, and students.

Use the /courses or /organizations folders

The /courses and /organizations folders can be used in several ways:

  • As a sandbox for instructors, teaching assistants, and course builders to create and share documentation amongst themselves, which may be linked to from inside the course for sharing with the course members.
  • As a space for students to directly access or collaborate on some of the course content.
  • To provide workspace and access to documents for broad user groups, such as all the instructors who are teaching in a department or all instructors who are interested in a specific research topic.

Use the /courses or /organizations folders as a sandbox

The course folder may be used as a sandbox for each course's instructors, teaching assistants, and course builders to create and share documentation amongst themselves. Additional permissions do not have to be applied because these roles already have default Full permission for their courses.

After content is created in the course folder, it may be linked to from inside the course for sharing with the course members.

Allow students selective access to course or organization folders

Instructors may want students to have access to the course folder to collaborate on group projects or write to collective documentation. For this to happen, permission should be extended to students in the course on the top-level course folder-named using the course ID. Sub-folders can be made selectively unavailable by removing student permission to these private folders.

Provide storage, workspace, and access for content collections

Realistically, many institutions have groups of users who are not members of the same courses or organizations who should have access to the same content.

To enable this, administrators can create a course ID or organization ID for a non-existent course, for example 'BotanyLevel1', and then enroll all users who will interact with content for that topic as instructors, course builders or students in the course.

The following is an example of how this course may be set up:

  • Give content managers and the role of Instructor in the course to grant them manage permission to all content. This will allow them to link to the material from their courses.
  • Give content creators the role of Course Builder in a course and grant them write permission to all content (remove the default manage permission for course builders, or create a new portal role with only read and write access on the course folder).
  • If content consumers (instructors) will link to the material directly from their courses, they must be instructors in the courses. Otherwise, they only need read access to view the material, and can first copy the material into their own course folders before linking to it.

Make the course unavailable to ensure that it can be accessed from the Content Collection /courses area, but cannot be accessed from eReserves or from the course catalog or courses portal modules.

As long as the course ID is not deleted, the course folder will appear in the Content Collection. This model allows content to be accessible beyond the timeline of an individual course.

Create folders in the course content area

The course and organization folders use existing IDs (course IDs and organization IDs) to create subfolders. For example, if a course has a course ID of Biology100, the course folder in the Content Collection is automatically named Biology100. Folders cannot be manually added to the courses or organizations top level folders, but subfolders may be added using Add Folder once inside the specific course or organization folder.

Access the course content area

Administrators should consider who has access to courses folders. By default, the system is set up to give full permission to the instructor, teaching assistants, and course builders. This also means that the folder is generated the first time one of these users opens on the Content Collection tab.

To edit these default role designations, go to Content Area Management on the Administrator Panel, Default Folder Creation Settings, and then select Edit in the menu for the /courses folder. Selecting additional course roles grants full permissions to those users. If users such as students should only have read access in an area, the permission must be edited on the Manage Permission folder for that individual course after the course folder has been generated.