Washington Center

Creating a Course

A Course page contains all of the basic information about a course offering at UCDC. Course pages are automatically linked to the calendar.

  1. After choosing Course from the CREATE CONTENT tab you will see the Course template.
  2. Fill in the Title field. This will become the name of the page. It also becomes part of the URL for the page.
  3. Next select the name of an instructor from the Instructor field.
  4. After that, select the appropriate term from the Term or Semester pull-down menu.
  5. Below the Term or Semester pull-down menu is the DATE AND TIME pane. The date and time of the course are set here. The default configuration has the Show End Date checkbox checked and displays the start and end time with the current date and time automatically filled in.
  6. TIP: In most circumstances, you should accept the default configuration. Do not check the All Day checkbox and leave the Show End Date checkbox checked.
  7. To modify the start date and time, click in the first Date field. Clicking in the Date field brings up a calendar. Click on the desired date within the calendar to enter it into the field.
  8. Enter the start time in the first time field. The Course template uses a 24 hour clock for inputting time (for instance, 15:45 is 3:45 PM).
  9. Next move to the end date and time. Set the end date to the same date as the start date. Then enter the end time of the course.
  10. NOTE: Setting the end date to a date different from the start date will cause the session to span uninterrupted across those dates. Instead use the Repeat feature to setup additional sessions of the course.
  11. Checking the Repeat checkbox, displays the features associated with this feature.
  12. You may set how often a course session occurs by selecting Daily, Weekly, Monthly or Yearly from the Repeats pull down menu. Usually courses repeat weekly.
  13. Then indicate the frequency of repeats. That is, every week, every other week, every three weeks and so on.
  14. Click on a day of the week under Repeat on if it repeats on a particular day of the week.
  15. Use Stop repeating to set an end date for the sequence. You can either choose to stop repeating the event after a specific number of occurrences or set to end on a specific date.
  16. Choose the Exclude dates checkbox, if you have a break in the sequence before it conclusion. For instance, an event is scheduled to occur every Monday for the next ten weeks except on the fourth Monday which is a holiday.
  17. Choose the Include dates checkbox, if you wish to include a date outside the sequence. For instance, an event is scheduled to occur every Monday for the next ten weeks. However in the sixth week you also will have a session on Wednesday.
  18. Once you have set the date and time, move on to the Course ID field. This should correspond to the UCDC course ID for the class.
  19. Fill in the number of credits a student may earn for the course in the Credits field.
  20. Move to the Section field. You must associate the course with the Academic section in order to save the web page.
  21. Type or paste text into the Description field. This will be the core content of the page. The palettes in the toolbar of the HTML editor should be similar to those in Microsoft Word. You can learn the function of each tool in the tool palette by hovering over the icon. Most tools relate to a specific editing or HTML function. The Source tool enables you to edit the actual HTML code. Use this feature with great care.
  22. TIP: If you copy text from another document to paste into the Body, use the Paste as plain text button. (It looks like a clipboard with a notepad.)
  23. You may want to add images within the body of the page. Here’s how.
  24. You may also want to link to other web pages within the web site, external URLs or to documents. Here's how.
  25. There is usually no reason to switch the Text format. Please leave it set to the default which is Full HTML.
  26. Use the Campus pull down menu to assign a sponsoring campus to the course.
  27. Use the Category pull down menu to assign the course category (Quarter Elective, Semester Elective, Core Seminar or Special).
  28. Use the Category pull down menu to assign the course to a classroom.
  29. Occasionally, an instructor will have a personal web page for a course hosted on an external server. You can attach a link to the Course page by providing the title and URL of this page.
  30. At the bottom of the page you will see several vertical tabs. Please ignore these. Also, please ignore the Provide a menu link. Do not check it. Improper menu linking can create serious issues with the web site. If you would like to link your page to the main menu, please contact Rodger Rak or Marc Sandalow.
  31. Click the Save button to save the page. Depending on your status as a Content Creator or Publisher you may need to send this page to review or publish to the web site.