Instructor Support for Educational Systems

The optimal workflow for creating and adding content to your course

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This article walks you through a recommend workflow while creating and adding content to your course. 

Prepare course outline & structure

Chances are your course is already provided with one of the two standard Leiden Course Structures: a week or theme structure or is already fully migrated by our Support Team. Nevertheless, you may want to finetune your course outline and structure to optimize it to your needs:

Prepare assessments and other course activities

Before adding content into your course structure we highly recommend to first create certain assessments and other course activities. The flow of first creating e.g. an (Turnitin) assignment and then placing it in the right unit saves you a lot of going back and forth.

Assessments

Tip! Have look at the Preparing Assessments unit in the Brightspace Online Training for Instructors course as well. 

  1. Optional: Set up the Gradebook if you would like to register Grades in Brightspace. 
  2. Create and set your Brightspace assessments:

Other course activities

The course activities below should also be created first before you add a link to the activity in your course content:

  • Create a Survey
  • Create a Checklist
  • Create a Self Assessment [manual under construction]
  • Create a Course Chat [manual under construction]

Add content to your course

When you have a clear view on the structure of your course and the assessments you can start adding the content in your structure. 

Go to Content in your course and select a Unit or Lesson where you want to place a content item.

 Two buttons will appear on the screen:

  1. Add Existing:
    • From here you can add already made assignments, discussions, quizzes to the content of your course. Moreover, from here you are also able to upload documents and place them directly in your course.
  2. Create New:
    • From here you can create html documents and weblinks and place them directly in your course.
    • Please note that you are also able to create new assessment types via this button. We highly recommend you to first create your assessments and then placing them in the course content via Add Existing.

Optional: add a start and end date

Make sure you make set the lesson to visible if you want to work with a start and end date!

You can add a start and end date to your lesson to make it visible only during the set period.

  1. Select the start date of the lesson. This will determine when the content item will be visible to students.
  2. Select the end date of the lesson. This will determine when the content item will be switched to hidden.

If all the lessons should start and end at the same time, you can adjust the dates in the corresponding Unit.

Manuals on adding content to your course per content type

Below you can find links to extensive manuals per content item type and how to add them to your course content.

Finalizing steps

Tip! Have a look at the When the course's start date is approaching unit in the Brightspace Online Training for Instructors course as well.

As finalizing steps you can keep the following in mind:


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