Tag Archives: Course Hub

Google Apps now available through the Course Hub

We are pleased to announce that instructors can now create Google Apps folders for their classes via the Course Hub. The following short video shows the process:

The Course Hub will create the class folder and share it with the instructors, students, and audits groups for your course section. The Hub also makes it easy to set the default role for students/audits: either “Reader” which can only view documents and files or “Writer” which allows students/audits to create and upload documents and files.

As recently announced, we hope to provide a similar integration for Office 365/OneDrive in the coming months.

 

Group support added to WordPress

We are pleased to announce the addition of a much-awaited feature to our WordPress site network. As of today groups added to sites can automatically maintain their membership over time. Site administrators will no longer have to go back into WordPress and regularly bulk-add groups to grant access to new group members.

In the WordPress Dashboard
When you add users to a WordPress site by group the new default option is to keep the group in sync:

Adding a new group to a site, keeping the group in sync.

Adding a new group to a site.
Note the new “Keep in Sync” option.

All users currently in the group will be added to the site with the role you specified. Members of the group who already have a role with greater abilities will not have their permissions reduced. Members of the group who already have a role with less abilities will be raised to the role specified for the group.

The groups synced are shown in a list and can be removed if desired.

The groups synced are shown in a list and can be removed if desired.

Over time, as people are added to the group, their roles in the site will be updated whenever they log into WordPress. If a person is removed from a group they will have their role in the site removed when they log into WordPress if their role hasn’t been manually changed to a different level.

More details about group-synchronization are available in the LIS Wiki.

In the Course Hub
In tandem with this new feature in the WordPress dashboard, the Course Hub now automatically adds class-groups to WordPress sites when adding WordPress Resources. When you add a WordPress Resource to the Course Hub the screen now includes an option that lets you specify what role to give students in the WordPress site. (Instructors will always be administrators of the site.)

Choose which role to give students in the WordPress site.

Choose which role to give students in the WordPress site.

When you save the WordPress Resource in the Course Hub three class-groups (instructors, students, and audits) are added to WordPress site and kept in sync. Instructors no longer need to do the extra step of going to WordPress and adding the class-groups to the site. As well, new students enrolled during the “Add/Drop Period” will automatically have access to the WordPress site when they log in after their enrollment has processed.

The instructors, students, and audits groups are automatically added to WordPress by the Course Hub.

The instructors, students, and audits groups are automatically added to WordPress by the Course Hub.

If you delete the WordPress Resource from the Course Hub the users and class-groups it added will be removed from the WordPress site, however the site itself will not be deleted automatically.

Change Moodle site availability from the Course Hub

By default, when you create a Moodle site it is set to be “not available to students” to give you time to add site content before students can access the site.

Unfortunately, the “availability” setting can be a bit hard to find in Moodle settings. To make this important setting easier to change and its current state more visible, you can now set its value from right in the Course Hub when creating or editing the Moodle Resource:

New Course Hub / Middfiles integration

New for the Fall 2012 semester is integration between the “Classes Folders” on Middfiles and the Course Hub.

When you put files in the HANDOUTS/ or SHARE/ folders of your class folder, a “Middfiles Class Folder” resource will automatically be added to your Course Hub site. This resource provides a link that allows students to easily browse the files without having to mount a network drive. There is nothing extra you need to do. Read on for more details.

Continue reading →

New Course Hub Feature: Create Lab/Discussion Sites

As of today, instructors can create Course Hub sites for lab, discussion, independent study, and other section-types that do not have Course Hub sites automatically created.

Lab/discussion Course Hub sites are not needed for the majority of courses as the lecture/seminar sites usually suffice. However, they may be useful in the following cases:

  • The lab is taught by a separate instructor with its own resources and syllabus.
  • You wish to create separate resources (e.g. Moodle sites) for each discussion section.

Continue reading →

Segue’s Decommissioning, Course Hub, and Curricular Technology Workshops

Segue’s decommissioning will culminate on Friday August 31st, 2012 when Segue is taken offline.  In preparation for this deadline, as of January 1st, 2012, faculty will no longer be able to create Segue websites. We recommend that all new sites be created in either Moodle or WordPress.  Segue migration workshops will begin in Winter Term and continue into the Spring and Summer 2012 semesters. Continue reading →

Course Hub Case Studies

The Course Hub is being actively used by a variety of courses this fall.  To give a sense of the different ways faculty are using this new platform, we’ve made a short screencast that shows a number of courses and some the resources they have linked to their course hub sites.

[middmedia E966CA341E9D26A5EA67ECDE36E4C402 achapin course-hub-case-studies01.mp4 width:400 height:254]

Class Photo Rosters now in the Course Hub

For more than a decade the Web Applications group and its predecessors have provided a popular “class photo roster” through the online directory to help instructors match names to faces. We are pleased to announce that as of today, the class photo roster is now a feature of the Course Hub.

As with the old version, the photo roster is only accessible to the instructor[s] of a course. We hope that by moving the photo roster into the Course Hub it will be easier to use and more readily accessible. While we don’t have a shutdown date yet, the old version of the photo roster will likely disappear when the online directory is next rebuilt (not until sometime after the current semester).

Faculty, please give this new feature a try (look for the Roster links in the Course Hub) and give us any feedback you may have.