Authoring With Course Cafe

Creating Your First Course

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First published on April 30, 2019. Last updated on May 11, 2019.


Instructions for creating a course with lessons

  1. Go to Dashboard. On the left hand side menu, hover over over Courses and click on Add New.
  2. You should be taken to a new page to enter your course. Under the Edit Course label, enter the course title and and desired content.
  3. Then in the upper right hand corner, click Save Draft. (You can save as often as you wish). To make the course publicly available, click Publish.
  4. On the left hand side menu, hover over over Lessons and click on Add New.
  5. Add the Lesson title.
  6. Enter some content into the large field in your Lesson’s entry view, below the Add Media button and text editing tools.
  7. If you want to attach your lesson to a course, choose the course name in the Related Course list.
  8. Then, in the upper right hand corner, click Save Draft. However, the lesson will not appear on the course page until you click Publish.
  9. On the left hand side menu, hover over over Courses and click on All Courses.
  10. When you see a list of courses, then hover just under your course’s title and click on the Edit link.
  11. You can preview your courses or lessons at any time.
  12. To view the course as a student or other reader, click on the link to the right of “Permalink:” beneath the title.

Editing your a course and lessons

As a Course Cafe author, you can go back and edit your courses and lessons at any time. Just go to the Course list or Lessons list, and click Edit beneath the content item title. Remember save your work by clicking the relevant button, which might be Save Draft, Update, or Publish, all in the upper right hand corner in the Publish pane.

Suggestion: first create a list of your planned lessons. The create the lessons in reverse order of the order for them to be read. They will then appear in your desired order for readers. If you ever need to change the order, please contact the Course Cafe administrator.

Caveat: if you change your course title, you will need to change it in each of the lessons for that course.

Backing Up Your Contents

You should periodically back-up your course by periodically generating a PDF of your course. This is accomplished by clicking the Print book for this course button on the course page. Back-ups are made of the entire Course Cafe site, the the availability of such back-ups cannot be guaranteed.

Setting up course navigation and searchability

You can go ahead and create a course on your own. Linked titles for all of the lessons for the course should appear on the course page. However, once a reader is in a lesson, there may be additional set-up required for the links to and previous and next lesson to work as desired. The first step is to contact the administrator to set up a category for your course. It could have the same title as your course. However, it does not have to have the same title, but it should be different from any existing category.

Once the category is set up, then select it for any lesson that you wish to appear in the footer navigation. However, do not select a category if you wish to omit it from footer navigation. For example, you might wish to have break-out lessons for students who need extra practice or background, but which would not be appropriate for all of your students.

Accessibility

To maximize the impact of your content, you should make it accessible to a  range of users with diverse abilities, backgrounds and devices. Further, some organizations require content to be accessible per various standards. For further information, see Accessibility and Universal Design.


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Content is copyright the author. Layout is copyright Mark Ciotola. See Corsbook.com for further notices.