Faculty Use of Courses, Course Websites, and Communities

Article Content

This article covers the following topics. Click on the topic to go to that section of the article.

Introduction
Courses
Course Websites
Communities

Introduction

The Courses module and Communities module in Elentra are integral tools designed to support faculty in managing and delivering course content. The Courses module provides a centralized place for organizing course objectives, managing student enrollments, maintaining gradebooks, and integrating other assessments. This module serves as the cornerstone for linking other Elentra features, such as the Assessment & Evaluation and Scheduling modules, to facilitate efficient course management and coordination.

The Communities module extends the functionality of the Courses module by offering a customizable digital interface for course website delivery. It allows faculty to create a virtual hub for sharing announcements, distributing learning materials, and fostering engagement through discussions and other interactive features. This module enhances the overall learning experience by enabling a dynamic and collaborative environment for both instructors and students.

This article outlines the primary features of these modules and provides guidance on their effective use to support instructional and administrative needs.

Courses

In Elentra, a course for a faculty user (i.e., Faculty:Director, Faculty:Admin, Faculty:Lecturer, Faculty:Faculty) serves as the foundational organizational entity for managing and delivering academic content, assessments, and student interactions. Most faculty users will not have any administrative permissions to courses with the exception of a Faculty:Director user. As such, most faculty users will only have the Learner View of the course. The Learner View of a module in Elentra offers faculty members a firsthand perspective of the student experience, enabling them to view the same content and interface as learners without the need to log in separately as a learner. More specifically, the Learner View of a course (i.e., when you open Courses from the Navigation menu) consists of being able to view and interact with the course website only. To view the content associated to a course, such as a learner's schedule or associated assessments, the faculty member will need to navigate to the relevant module (e.g., Learning Events, Assessment & Evaluation, Grading Tasks, etc.).

When a course is set up in Elentra, the faculty members involved with the course may be designated as Course Contacts, potentially providing them with a key role in the course management process. A Faculty:Director user designated as a course's director in Elentra is granted administrative rights to manage the course within the platform. In this case the Faculty:Director user will be known as the Course Director and will have a Director View, allowing them limited access to certain course functions.

The Course Director can access the administrative view in one of two ways.

The first method involves navigating to the Admin drop down list in the Navigation menu and selecting "Manage Courses."
Alternatively, the user can click on "Courses" in the Navigation menu and then switch to the Director View using the Display Style option located in the left sidebar of the screen.

In the Director View, Faculty:Director users will only be able to view and edit courses where they have been assigned as the Course Director. Course Directors will have access to the Content, Gradebook, CBME (if enabled) and Reports tabs. Learn more about course administration with the Admin Guides here.

Course Websites

Whenever a course is created in Elentra, a basic course landing page that is contained all on one page is automatically generated. This basic course landing page can include the following,

The faculty and admin that are associated to the course from the course's setup page.
A course description and director's message.
The curriculum tags that have been tagged to the course.
Uploaded course resources, url links, LTI connection.

This page can be configured by Elentra users that have administrator rights to the course.

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Alternatively, a course may have a dedicated course website created through the Communities module. If this option is utilized, it will replace the basic course landing page, directing learners and faculty users to the course website when they access the learner view of the course. The course website can also be accessed by navigating to "Communities" in the Navigation menu.

Course websites in Elentra are unique among communities because they include versioning for each curriculum period in which the course is offered. The curriculum period switcher is in the top left of every course website. When you access course websites, the system automatically defaults to the currently active curriculum period. However, if your institution manages multiple overlapping curriculum periods, you may need to manually select the specific period you wish to view. Each version of the course website will have a different group of students as the audience, based on enrollment in the course.

The course website can have customized pages built per course and per curriculum period. Only course website administrators can configure the pages in a course website. As a Faculty user, you may receive the role of Community Administrator for the course websites associated with your courses, based on your organization’s specific configuration. This will grant you the right to manage the configuration of the pages and the settings of the course website. To learn more about creating a course website and the available course website page types please see the Course Websites article in the Admin User Guide. coursewebsitefull

Communities

A general community is one that is not associated with a course. It can be created by any user to facilitate document sharing, online discussions, and various collaborative activities. Communities can be configured as public, allowing anyone to join, or as protected, where access is restricted to authenticated users only. Use cases for faculty members creating a community include faculty resource communities, continuing faculty education communities, faculty union communities. etc. Examples of communities that learners may create include club communities (e.g., book club, cooking club, knitting club, etc.), study group communities, etc.

Users in Elentra can be a assigned the following role in a Community:

Non-Member: Depending on the community settings, users may be restricted from joining; require an invitation; or be able to click to join the community.
Community Member: Community members can interact with all content in the community that is available to members & subscribe to community notifications.
Community Administrator: Administrators can manage the community settings; members; pages; and page contents.

For more details on Community administration, see the following Admin guides: