Module 1

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Module 1: Build Your bCourses Site

Many instructors already use their bCourses site as a way to communicate with students, distribute files, and collect assignments. You can even go beyond these basic functions to build a robust bCourses site that becomes an important component of your class where students can find reading assignments and recorded lectures, take exams and submit assignments, and look for guidance from you as the course progresses. In this module, we'll focus on strategies you can employ to make your bCourses site easy for students to navigate and ensure they won't miss the items they need to succeed in the course. 

Before you start this module, it's recommended that you first create your bCourses site. If you haven't done that before, refer to the following article from the Teaching and Learning Knowledge Base. Note that you will need to authenticate with your CalNet ID the first time you access the article.

How do I create a course site? Links to an external site.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this module, you'll be able to:

  1. Use the DLS Core Template and other Course Design Tools to develop an organized and fully accessible bCourses site
  2. Include information in your syllabus on policies, communication expectations, and technical requirements
  3. Provide a downloadable syllabus in your bCourses site
  4. Use learning objectives to divide content into distinct and purposeful modules
  5. Provide required readings electronically in bCourses
  6. Provide materials and assignments for each week, module, or unit using Pages in bCourses
  7. Use Modules to create consistent navigation throughout your bCourses site
  8. Define Home in the Course Navigation of your bCourses site
  9. Apply best practices for building your bCourses site.

All of these learning objectives will help you to achieve the overall course objective: Use your bCourses site to present materials, administer assessments and assignments, and engage students.

How To Do It

Use the DLS Core Template and other Course Design Tools to develop an organized and fully accessible bCourses site

The DLS Core Template was developed by Digital Learning Services using bCourses' built-in course construction and management tools including Pages, Modules, Discussions, Assignments, and Quizzes. It offers a consistent organization founded in best practices in online pedagogy that ensures students can easily access materials and engage with your course without the need to learn any additional tools.

For more information on how to access and use the DLS Core Template, refer to the Core Template Getting Started Guide linked below.

Please note that by using the DLS Core Template in your bCourses site, you will automatically implement the rest of the recommendations in this module.

In addition to the Core Template, DLS has already provided other Course Design tools like a Faculty Quality Checklist and Course Map for advanced course planning. You can access these materials via the DLS website.

Include information in your syllabus on policies, communication expectations, and technical requirements

The syllabus is an important component to all courses and you likely already have standard language you include around your course policies. As you prepare to accommodate student needs and potential disruptions, you may need to revise some policies or add new ones.  

Via the Syllabus Design page of the CTL website, you can access useful information for developing a syllabus and a syllabus template designed by DLS that specifically addresses items like student wellness and technical components and support. You may use the template for your own course, noting areas highlighted in red that are specific to each individual course and thus need to be changed, or borrow language as you see fit. One benefit of using the template is that it has been remediated for use by a screenreader, making it fully accessible for Disabled Students' Program (DSP) students.

Provide a downloadable syllabus in your bCourses site

Once you have your syllabus ready, you can add it to your bCourses site as a downloadable document. There are benefits to having the syllabus added directly to bCourses and as a downloadable document, but if you are going to choose one, it's best to have it downloadable because it allows students the option to read it offline.

The following articles from the Canvas Guides provide information on all the actions you'd need to take to upload your syllabus to the course.

You can add the syllabus for download in the Syllabus section in bCourses, found in the left navigation of your course site. The Syllabus section includes additional information automatically populated as you add items in bCourses such as the grade breakdown and due dates for assignments and exams. The following articles from the Canvas Guides provides information about the Syllabus section and how to use it.

Use learning objectives to divide content into distinct and purposeful modules

As a common practice, online course materials and assignments are organized into modules and guided by learning objectives. Thinking in terms of what students need to accomplish each week, rather than in each class session, is useful when conducting a course that is asynchronous; this replaces an organization structure that focuses on class session/meeting. You may have noticed in the Syllabus Template that the schedule is organized by weeks with topic titles to set up this structure.

If you have been organizing your course by class sessions, this is a good opportunity to revisit your course-level and topic learning objectives and begin grouping readings, lectures, and assignments around those learning objectives to create distinct and purposeful modules. Likely, your class sessions are already structured around learning objectives, so it will just be a matter of moving the content from those 'sessions' into one module. Going through that process will enable you to organize the material in a consistent format throughout your bCourses site (this will be discussed in the next section). The following resource from CTL provides guidance on drafting and using learning objectives to organize course materials. 

Provide required readings electronically in bCourses

bCourses is great tool for ensuring students have access to all of the reading assignments in your class, especially at times when they may not be able to purchase the materials and receive them in a timely fashion. That's not to say that you can't assign students to read books that must be purchased. Rather, it's an opportunity if you rely mostly on articles for your assigned reading to see what you can provide to students electronically.

The UC Berkeley Library has many resources and the subject librarians can help you find specific articles and resources you'd like to provide to your class. 

You can provide your reading assignments to students by adding them to the relevant weekly landing page, explained further below. The articles from the Canvas Guides linked below provide directions on how to add a file to a page in the course.

Provide materials and assignments for each module using Pages in bCourses

Once you have divided your content into modules using your learning objectives, you can use Pages to provide all of the materials for a week or module in one location. You'll notice that this training course is designed using Pages to provide content. (In fact, you are reading this all on a page right now!) Pages allow you to provide text, links, videos, and more in one place for students to find and to give context to how those materials relate to each other.

Learn more about Pages and the Rich Text Editor highlighted in the overview videos from Canvas.

Below are highlighted articles from the Canvas Guides relevant for using Pages.

In addition to using Pages to provide the materials for a module or week, you can use the Pages internal linking feature to direct students to other module or week pages. Please notice that, in this course, the upper right corner of module landing page includes links to the other landing pages. This aids the user navigation experience. If you were to only use those links you could still get to every resource in the course.

The following article from the Canvas Guides explains how to create these internal links throughout the course. Though the article focuses on how to link to other pages, you can use the same process to add links on a page to assignments, quizzes, announcements, and discussions. 

Use Modules to create consistent navigation throughout your bCourses site

Course navigation refers to how students will get from one section of the course to another. It is essential to have a consistent structure in your course navigation to ensure students find important instructional materials and assignments. Students should rely on the same method of finding instructional materials and assignments throughout the duration of the course. In this section, we'll look at how you can use the Modules tool to create structure. Note that we're referring to the Modules tool in bCourses, as opposed to the general term modules referring to grouping content.

Modules in bCourses provide a way to organize content together and create a learning path for students. You'll notice that, in this course, there are "Previous" and "Next" buttons at the bottom of each page. These buttons are generated by the order of content in Modules. If you only pushed those buttons, you will get to every resource in this course.

Learn more about Modules in the highlighted video and articles from the Canvas Guides linked below.  

Define Home in the Course Navigation of your bCourses site

Once you've determined how you are going to organize your modules, both in terms of grouping instructional materials and setting them up in bCourses, you'll want to make sure students know exactly how to get to those materials when they enter the course. To do this, you will need to set your "Home" for your bCourses site. 

Let's first take a closer look at the Course Navigation Menu, also referred to as the left-hand navigation bar, which you will see on the left side of every course in bCourses. You can read more about how to organize the Course Navigation in the articles linked from the Canvas Guides below.

The "Home" navigation link is at the top of the Course Navigation Menu and it is the one item in the menu that you cannot move or disable. Having a course "Home" ensures that the students will be able to return to a familiar and navigable area should they get lost in the course. You determine which page is set as "Home" in your course. While, in this course, "Home" is a page, it could also be the Syllabus or Module section.

The following materials from the Canvas Guides will show you how you can set the Home in your course.

Best Practices

Now that you know how to complete the activities covered in this module, read more about how best to use them in your course.