Guides

In addition to the normal online course experience, Course Builder offers a less-linear browsing experience called “guides”.

By turning this on, students can browse traditional online courses as a series of units in whatever order they prefer. It is also suited for alternative content such as tutorials, documentation, and codelabs.

All guides for all courses in a Course Builder deployment are viewed together at /modules/guides/. For instance, if the deployment is at myapp.appspot.com, then the guides would be accessed at myapp.appspot.com/modules/guides/.

Guides also utilize responsive web design, creating an optimized mobile experience for phones, tablets, and other devices.

Enable Guides

  1. Go to Settings > Guides.

  2. Check the box to Enable Guides.

Turning on this setting allows anyone with access to the content to see it at /modules/guides/.

Color

The guides for each course are grouped together and colored the same. Setting a color will control the headings for all of this course’s guides. The color must be expressed as a web color hex triplet, such as #FFFFFF.

If the color is left blank, #00838F will be used.

Duration

By specifying the average length of each lesson in the course (in minutes), the duration and time remaining for each guide will be displayed to the student. The time is calculated by multiplying this value by the number of lessons in the guide (unit).

If the duration is left blank, no times will be shown to the student.

Note: The total duration for a guide will include any private lessons even though students will not be able to access them.

Availability

By default, the guides for a course use the Course Availability setting, but this setting can be overridden to make them explicitly private. The availability options for guides are:

  • Private – only administrators can access
  • Course – follows Course Availability setting

Note: If a course is Registration Required, a guide is only accessible to registered students. Such students must be registered and logged in before visiting the guides page.