SU 115

Introduction to Online Courses

This module will cover the following chapters
Online CoursesCourse
Creation and Editing

 Module Overview

This module will take you approximately 15 minutes to complete.

By the end of this module, you will be able to

Create an Online Course
Select your Online Course parameters
Navigate the course editor

Next: Online Course Walkthrough

Next, we’ll take a quick look at what you’ll learn in this course in a brief video walkthrough. This walkthrough provides a quick introduction to using SmarterU’s built-in course creator.
After the video, we will explore each concept in detail, defining what an online course is, as well as how to create and edit online courses.

Let's take a look at what you'll learn in this course.
LET'S TAKE A LOOK AT WHAT YOU'LL LEARN IN THIS COURSE.

Next: Online Course Walkthrough

Online Courses in SmarterU allow you to present your training material in many different ways including text, audio, and video.
You can also include interactivity through SmarterGames™ and quizzes.
Online Courses also allow learners to do training

Benefits of Online Courses:

  • Engage learners with the training
  • Provide identical training to all learners
  • Give learners practice activities and quizzes
  • Able to update content easily

Although there isn’t a universal agreement on how long an Online Course should be, best practices indicate that course modules should be no longer than 15 – 20 minutes in duration.

As a general rule, keep Online Courses as short as possible. Focus on important concepts and only include the details that are necessary. Provide links to additional information for Learners who want to learn more.

Break up training into short, manageable modules.

Let learners work at their own pace, to get the most out of their training experience.

Creating an Online Course

To create an Online Course, go to the Course Dashboard and click Online Course from the drop down menu. You can also click on the + Online Course button to do this.

Note: You will need the Group Manager (GM) or Create Course (CC) permission to create a course.

This will open up a new window where you can set up and customize your course.

Setting Parameters for an Online Course

When setting up an Online Course, you must:

The rest of this chapter will describe some of the different ways that you can customize your Online Course.

  • Select the group you want the course to be in
  • Add a course name
  • Add a course description

Once those are set, you can save your course to proceed with the default settings.

The next set of slides describe the other settings available for an Online Course.

Setting Parameters for an Online Course

In the Groups section you can assign a course to Selected Groups or All Groups. When you select the All Groups option, the course will be automatically assigned to all groups that currently exist in the account and all new groups as they are created. This is helpful if you want a course to be available to every group.
The following users can assign a course to All Groups:

Note: Non-admin users, including those with the Group Manager (GM) or Create Course (CC) group permission, will need to be assigned the Allow Adding Courses to All Groups account permission to see the All Groups option.

Online Courses

If you are an Admin or have the Allow Adding Courses to All Groups permission, when you select All Groups you will have the option to enable self-enroll and auto-enroll. These settings will be applied every time the course is added to a group.

Note: The auto-enroll, self-enroll, and credits settings only apply when you initially add a course to a group. If the course already exists in the group these settings will have no effect.

If you enable auto-enroll, the course will appear in the group's Recommended Enrollments.
If you enable self-enroll, users in the group will be able to enroll themselves in the course.

If you are an Admin and have credits enabled, you will also have the option to require users to use credits to enroll in the course.

Online Course Settings

In the Access Options section, you can limit how many IP addresses learners can access the course from.

Use this option if you want to limit the number of computers from which a learner can access their training. This provides a way to prevent learners from sharing the training material outside of the workplace.

Under the Customization section, you can upload a footer for your course that will appear at the bottom of each page. This will override the footer set for the account.

You can also upload an image for your course that will appear on the Course Dashboard and on a course's More Details page on the Learner Dashboard.

Within the Customization section, you will also be able to select your course certificate.

You can choose to issue no certificate, issue your account's default certificate, or upload a course-specific custom certificate. Uploaded certificates must be PDFs in a specific format.

Already have a certificate? Let us get it SmarterU-ready for you! Please email your PDF certificate to taylor@neovation.com.

The course certificate can be emailed to learners when they complete the course.

In the Tags & Notifications section, you are able to add tags to your course. This makes it easy to organize your courses, assign them to Learners, and report on them.

IMPORTANT: Courses on the Learner Dashboard will be grouped by the FIRST tag assigned to the course.

In this section you may also set the feedback email. This is the email address that will receive any feedback submitted for this course. The Learner must have the Send Feedback option checked in their User Profile to be allowed to submit course feedback.

You can choose to have supervisors copied on outgoing emails.

By assigning tags to courses, you can group courses on the Learner and Course Dashboards.

This makes it easier for learners to find and access the courses that they need.

In the Completion Setup section, you can decide how long learners will be able to review the course after they have completed it.

Due dates help to motivate learners to complete the training in a timely manner, but should not be restrictive. People learn best when they are able to advance at their own pace; due dates should allow for this. You can also set a Grace Period to allow them time to complete the course beyond the due date.

In addition, this section gives you the option to customize the email that is sent to learners when they are enrolled in the course. You can also set the course to send a completion email to the learner when they have completed it. This email will contain their course certificate.

Within the Completion Setup section you can set the course to allow users to re-enroll upon completion. With this option turned on, after learners complete the course it will appear in their course catalog with the option to re-enroll. Learners will be able to re-enroll themselves in the course as many times as they want. You can also choose to have the system automatically re-enroll learners upon course completion—based on if they pass or fail the course.

Note: Re-enrollments will use the same enrollment settings and due date as the original course.

In the Grading section, determine if your course is going to be graded or not. If there are no quizzes in your course, set to Not Graded for accurate reporting.

  • Precise: Actual grade to two decimal places (ex: a score of 79.663 will be recorded as 79.66%)
  • Rounded: Grade is rounded to the nearest whole number (ex: a score of 79.663% will be recorded as 80%)

How Grading Works?

A learner achieves the following scores on three quizzes in a course:

The three options for calculating grades are:

  • Final Exam:
    Mark is based on final exam score
  • Average all Quizzes:
    Mark is based on average of all quiz scores
  • Weighted Average:
    Mark is based on the total marks achieved compared with the total potential marks
  • Quiz 1: 6/10 = 60%
  • Quiz 2: 7/10 = 70%
  • Quiz 3: 16/20 = 80%

If their grade is calculated by:

  • Final exam they would get 80%.
  • Average all quizzes they would get (60+70+80)/3 = 70%
  • Weighted average they would get (6+7+16)/(10+10+20) = 73%

Note: When Average all quizzes or Weighted average is selected, only quizzes marked to be included in the final grade are considered. This setting is in the Quiz settings.

Online Courses

You have the option to include computer generated narration through our Text-to-Speech (TTS) engine.

In the TTS Narration section, you can control how the TTS narration will sound.

Use the Voice drop down to change the gender of the speaker and thier accent.

TTS narration can be turned on or off in your account settings. Add narration on a slide-by-slide basis when creating your course content.

Note: TTS is currently only available in English.

Use the Effect drop down to adjust the audio effects such as the pitch, duration, and speaking speed. You can only apply one effect at a time.

Online Course Settings

Once you have worked through the setup of your Online Course, click Save. A new tab will open, titled Course Content.

This is where you will add all of the training materials to your course.

Editing and Previewing Online Courses

Once you are done creating a course, you can always return to edit or preview it.

To edit or preview a course, first go to the Course Dashboard.

  • Go to Course Admin on the main toolbar.
  • Click Course Dashboard.

 

Editing a Course

  • Select the course you want to preview.
  • Click Preview.
  • Click Access beside the task you want to preview.

Previewing a Course

  • Select the course you want to edit.
  • Open the Edit split button.
  • Select Edit Course to edit the course information and settings. Select Edit Content to edit the course content.

 

Learner Notes