Course Creator's Guide
- Luc Richard
The Context of Course Creators
The role of Course Creator can be assigned to a user in the context of the entire system (e.g. across the entire learning environment) or in the context of specific course categories. It's important to understand that if you can only create courses in specific course categories, some of the functionality described in this user guide will not be available to you. If you find yourself unable to complete the step-by-step instructions in this guide because your Course Creator role is restricted, we suggest you read the Managing Courses and Categories as a Restricted Course Creator troubleshooting article.
The following section describes the features in the learning environment that related to the creation of programs and courses. This functionality requires the Course Creator role but can also be done by a System Administrator.
Once a Course Creator creates a course, he/she automatically becomes an Instructor for the course. As such, in order to fully understand how to properly create courses, including adding activities and resources to the course, you must read the Instructor's Guide in addition to this guide.
The Object Model
It's important to understand the object model of the learning environment. These are basically 3 object types that need to be created in the learning environment in order to implement a full eLearning program:
Programs
Courses
Activities and Resources
Programs
A program, sometimes referred to as "curriculum", "learning plan", or simply "bundle" of courses, is an entity that allows you to plan learning for a group of users, such as a team or department, usually over a long period of time. Programs allow you to specify which courses individuals have to complete, and when.
It's important to understand that programs reference courses (unlike course categories, which contain courses). As such, it's possible for multiple programs to point to the same course as per the illustration below.
Courses (or Course Shells)
A course is essentially an empty shell meant to contain learning activities and resources. Once a course has been created, you need to add activities and resources as a second step.
It's important to understand that courses contain activities. As such, an activity cannot be re-used across multiple courses. If you want to re-use an activity in another course, you must duplicate that activity. That copy then becomes its own separate instance and modifying the first activity will not modify its copy.
Activities and Resources
Once a course has been created, someone with "teacher" permissions can then add activities and resources to this course, including SCORM files, Microsoft Office files, Adobe PDF files, videos, quizzes, surveys, or forums / discussions board to name a few.