Using the Course Context
How a Faculty Member Uses the Course Context
In general, you can use your course context to do the following types of things:
Track attendance.
Post a list of readings.
Distribute resources.
Post useful links.
Send email to the entire course, or to selected students.
Start, participate in, and monitor discussions in forums and chatrooms.
Create tests for students to complete online.
Track assignments that are completed outside the portal.
Enter scores for other criteria, such as participation, that you want to affect students’ grades.
Configure the system to generate students’ grades for the term based on their assignment grades or attendance, or both.
Review students’ midterm and final grades and submit them to your school’s ERP system (for example, Jenzabar One).
How Students and Others Use the Course Context
The behavior of a course context varies depending on the permissions of the user.
Students
Typically, students use the course context to do the following types of things:
Complete online tests and upload files.
Participate in forums.
Review their attendance records.
Review their grades—both for individual assignments and for the term overall.
Download resources.
Communicate with other students via chatrooms and email.
By default, all students in your course sections should belong to the “Students” role. Because of this, when students go to the course context, they see a view that is similar to the faculty view, but which has fewer options.
If you need to grant someone student access to your course, you can make the person a “non-roster student.” This process is described in Add a Non-Roster Student.
Additionally, some features behave differently depending on one’s role—for example, some features let faculty members see details about all students, but a student looking at the feature will see details only about his or her own work. At any time, you can see the student view using the Student Emulation feature, which is described in Previewing a Context as a Student.
Custom Roles
If appropriate, you can create custom roles and give those roles specific permissions. For example, you might do this if you want certain students to help manage a forum, or if you want a teaching assistant to be able to grade assignments. The process of creating roles is covered in Creating and Maintaining Roles.
When you create a role, you create the role for use solely in one context (such as your course context). There is a more universal type of role (called base roles, or global roles), but only administrators of the portal can create these.