Saturday, May 7, 2016

Designing an Undergraduate Course on ICT Sustainability: Part 6 - Course Page

This is the third in a series of posts on producing an undergraduate version of an on-line masters course on green ICT. In part 5 I provided a course description. Here I look at the design of the course home page. This will be almost identical to the existing one for postgraduates:
The course page is designed to present an outline of the course, in a format compatible with mobile devices. Each line has a hypertext link to where the student can find the details of what to do. The page starts with the course communications: a forum for announcements, a forum for student discussion and a one-to-one message system for students to communicate with instructors. Then there are the course notes consolidated into one e-book and the list of assignments. Last there are the units of the course listed (in this case one per week).

Most course units consist of just three lines: the topic (with a link to the relevant chapter in the e-book), a quiz and a forum. Some units have reminders about assignments (which are only visible for the period they are relevant) and assignment links are in the week the assignment is due.

Note that when installed in the institution's LMS, this would be accompanied by standard blocks, with the instructor's photo, CV and contact details, course outline, assessment, calendar and institutional rules. The text will automatically inherit the font and color set by the institution and the bullets will disappear. Also the LMS would be configured to display the student's progress to them, indicating which readings, forums postings, quizzes and assignments had been completed.

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