LON-CAPA Help
The "Course and Community Creation" menu provides access to a number of utilities
which Domain Coordinators can use to either manage the process of course creation. An individual course or community can be created interactively by completing a web form which offers several choices for generating the new course or community:
- Username: set the username of the owner, who will also receive a coordinator role.
- Course Title: This is the name under which the course will appear on the
Roles screen.
- Course Home Server: This is the server where the course will be housed.
- Course ID: This is an optional parameter to internally label the course.
Stored in the course environment.
- Course Code: This is the institutional code used to identify the course according to the naming scheme adopted by your institution for "official" courses.
- Map: This the top level sequence file in the course. If left blank, a
standard course will be created containing the first resource item (see below).
- NOT Standard Course: It this box is checked, the Map above becomes the
top-level map for the course, and
the main course sequence cannot be edited in DOCS. For standard courses,
the top-level map is a course-specific "uploaded" document, and points to
the above map.
- First Resource: This is the first resource which comes up after somebody
selects a role in this course (standard courses only).
- Clone an existing course: An alternative to creation of a new course with
a single item or a non-standard course with a sequence file as the top-level map is to copy the contents of an existing course into the new course.
- Open all assessments: Sets the course-level open date for all assignments
to "now". Circumvents the "not open to be viewed" problem.
- Set policy/content feedback: Sets the recipient address for these types
of feedback messages to the course coordinator.
- Disable student resource discussion: Disables the "bottom-of-the-page" discussions.
Two types of course "containers" are currently available in LON-CAPA:
The key difference between the two is that the Coordinator of a Course may import any published resource into the course as long as he/she has access rights for it, whereas import into a Community is restricted to just those resources for which the Coordinator is the author, or a co-author. In addition, the names of standard roles in the two containers have different names: (Course Coordinator vs. Coordinator, Instructor vs. Leader, Teaching Assistant vs. Assistant Leader, Student vs. Member).
In addition to using a web form to create courses one-at-a-time, Domain Coordinators can upload an XML file containing descriptions of courses to create multiple courses, see: Batch Creation of Courses (
). If the ability to request courses has been enabled, and certain course types have been set to require Domain Coordinator approval, then the "Approve or reject requests" item can be used to display a list of requests requiring approval. These may be approved or rejected. If a conduit has been established to an institutional data source which provides information about instructors of record, then the "View pending official course requests" may contain a list of requests for official courses, held pending validation. Validation can be attempted; if it still fails it is possible to override this and force creation of the course.
Lastly, there is access to a utility which can be used to display course and community creation history.