Multiple Courses

You can host multiple courses on your Course Builder site. On this page, you will learn how to

  • Add a new course to your site.
  • Use the Course Explorer to display a list of all available courses on your site’s landing page instead of defaulting to the homepage of the original course.
  • Customize common elements of all pages on your site.
  • Adjust the URL mapping of your site’s courses so that your courses will have the URLs that make the most sense.

Add a Course

Sign into an account with site-wide admin permissions.

Click Courses at the top of the dashboard menu.

Above the list of existing courses, find these buttons:

Add Course buttons

Add an empty course

Click Add Course….

In the dialog that appears, there are three fields:

  • Title
  • URL Component
  • Admin

add a course

Title

Enter the title for the course. This is the name of the course that will appear to students.

You can change the title of a course in Settings > Course.

URL Component

The URL component is the location within your site where the new course will appear.

For example, if your new course title is Writing Sonnets, you may want the course homepage URL to be

https://www.intro-to-poetry.appspot.com/writing_sonnets/

In this case, the text for to enter for URL Component is

writing_sonnets

Note that the URL component can only contain

  • lowercase letters
  • numbers
  • underscores

The URL component determines the course’s namespace. You can change a course’s URL component, but the namespace is fixed when the course is created.

Admin

The Admin field defaults to your address. You can add email addresses delimited by commas or spaces to give others course-wide admin permissions for the course.

Finishing up

Click OK and you will be returned to the Courses page that now lists your new course.

In the dashboard menu, the new course is now the current course.

At this point, you can

Add a sample course

You can also add a sample course. You provide the title and URL component for a sample course, but it comes with sample content of a completed course.

Click Add Sample Course… and then follow the same process for creating an empty course.

You can use a sample course as

  • a playground for learning how Course Builder works
  • a tool for creating a new course by replacing sample content with your own

Course Explorer

By default, your site’s landing page displays the homepage of the first course that you created. When you have multiple courses on your site, you can turn on the Course Explorer site setting to make the Course Explorer your landing page. The Course Explorer is a customizable page that lists all of the courses on a site. The course title and other details come from each course’s course settings.

Turn on Course Explorer

To turn on Course Explorer, you need to be signed into an account site-wide admin permissions.

  1. Go to Settings > Advanced site settings.

  2. Find the Course Explorer setting in the table. The default value is False.

  3. Click Edit to change the value.

  4. Under Configuration Property Override, check the Value checkbox and set Status to Active.

  5. Click Save.

Navigate to your site’s landing page and confirm that you see a list of courses. For each course, you can see the following details:

  • title
  • abstract
  • instructor details
  • category
  • start and end dates
  • estimated workload

You set the details for a course in the course’s Course Settings, except start and end dates, which you can set in the course’s availability settings.

The original course that was your site’s landing page can be reached using the URL component assigned when the course was created. You can change the URL component for any course on your site by changing the URL mapping.

Customize Common Elements

Customize the look and feel of your site’s pages (Course Explorer and all course pages) by updating the settings in Settings > Site settings.

Site Name

This name will appear on the header of your pages. It should convey something about your organization or the set of courses offered on the site.

This logo appears next to the site name in the top-left corner of the header of all course pages.

Site Logo Description

Include text to be read in place of the logo image.

Extra content

This setting lets you use the content editor to add custom content to the top of the Course Explorer page. This could be information about your organization, a description of the set of courses, or how to choose among them.

Note that this content only shows up on the Course Explorer page.

Organization Name

This name will appear in the footer of your pages, but only if an Organization URL is also provided.

Organization URL

Provide the URL that you want the Organization Name to link to.

Privacy & Terms URL

If your organization has a stock privacy and terms page, enter the address here. A link to the page will appear in the footer.

Change URL Mapping

When managing multiple courses, you may want to adjust a course’s URL component after the fact.

  1. Go to Settings > Advanced site settings.

  2. Find the Course URLs setting and click Edit. For this setting, the Value field is a text field.

  3. Scroll through the file to find the course whose URL you want to change and make the edit directly in the Value input field.

Notice that each line is a course that lists its URL component followed by its namespace.

When adjusting the URL, make sure to maintain the rest of the line’s format. Do not change the namespace to match the new URL; the namespace must stay as it was originally created.