Plan your course

The VLE @ GSA

How to…

Before you get started

When creating your course, it’s important to ensure that it’s easy to use in terms of navigation, layout, organisation of materials and appearance. It’s well worth taking some time with a piece of paper to consider:

• The purpose of the course• The menu items that you’d like to have available• What key content you’ll include and where• How you’ll organise information (by week, topic, etc)• What media (images, audio, video) you might use• What Tools you’d like to make available

This is a great way to make sure that information is easy to find, and that staff and students can easily access the stuff that they need to.

Planning a course in the VLE

A course can be created for you, and relevant staff and students enrolled on it. However, as the Instructor who has responsibility how the course looks and operates, there are a few things to consider in making your course accessible and easy to use:

• Colour scheme – you can customise this in the Control Panel, but make sure that e.g. text is still readable.

• Contact info – though most of your students may know who you are and where to find you, it’s useful for your info to be available for reference in the VLE.

• Make content obvious – when naming files and folders, use a name that will give a clear idea of the purpose of a file e.g. term1timetable.doc

• Use descriptive text – again, in the interest of providing context, add some accompanying text about resources you upload.

Organising a course menu

It’s important for a course menu to be clear and the purpose of each area/ item obvious. The below example shows some of the main areas to include, as well as tools for editing.

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1. Add new items to the menu here.

2. Click and drag these arrows to rearrange order of items.

3. Shows that content area (menu item) is empty.

4. Edit the names of menu items by clicking here.

5. Shows that menu item is not available.

Clarifying the purpose of contentMake the purpose of all files and folders clear with intuitive names and

descriptive text.

This example shows potentially

confusing content, with little

context or clarification. When

adding files, organise the folder

structure so that files are saved

into relevant and appropriate

folders as opposed to being

posted in one long list.

Whilst this example is much clearer, and the contents of the folder more obvious.