Before determining what customizations, if any, you want to apply to your course, you should become familiar with the publisher-provided content. You can use the course "as is," or you can modify, hide, move, and remove publisher-provided content and tools as needed to suit your course structure and objectives.
Use the following features to navigate to areas of your course and review publisher-provided content and resources:
· The course home page (if it appears) displays a dynamic course outline that you can expand and collapse. You can click links in the outline to navigate to areas of the course and review content.
· The course map displays in a separate browser window. Like the course home page outline, the map expands and collapses. Clicking a link navigates to the given area of the course.
· The course menu, which is the set of buttons on the left side of the CourseCompass window, provides another navigation tool. Each menu button displays an area of the course containing content or tools.
· The Control Panel is an area of the course restricted to instructors and users with Section Instructor access. It contains the tools you need to set course properties, manage course content and resources, and manage users and groups.
Look in these areas of your course for preloaded content:
· Content areas are the repositories for all your course content. Your course has a number of content areas set up by default. The course menu has a button for each content area available in the course.
· Tool areas are the repositories for online tools, such as communication, that both you and your students can access. Most courses have at least two tool areas set up: Communication and Tools. Like content areas, tool areas are accessible from buttons in the course menu. For example, clicking Tools displays links to a variety of course tools, including the gradebook, course calendar, and Digital Dropbox. Clicking Communication displays links to a variety of communications resources, including a Discussion Board, e-mail, and real-time collaboration tools.
Note: Unlike content, tools are not editable or removable. You can, however, modify a tool area to disable tools in the preloaded tool areas and even make a tool area unavailable to your students.
· Assessment/Test Manager is a resource in the Assessments area of the Control Panel that lets you manage publisher-provided tests and create and assign your own tests and surveys. You can view the Deployed column to see if a test has already been added to a content area. Publisher-provided tests that appear in content areas are typically practice tests that can be taken more than once, but may have a point value and weight assigned that you can modify in the gradebook. In all other cases, you must explicitly add tests to content areas.
· TestGen Manager is a resource in the Assessments area of the Control Panel that lets you manage tests created with the TestGen application and then uploaded to CourseCompass. If your course has publisher-provided TestGen tests, they will be listed here.
· Pool Manager is a resource in the Assessments area of the Control Panel that lets you manage publisher-provided assessment question pools and create your own pools. If your course has publisher-provided question pools, they will be listed here. You can draw from these question pools to create your own tests and surveys.