Posts Tagged by Home
There’s no place like Home!
| February 3, 2012 | Filed under Tips and Tricks |
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What do your students see the first time they log in to your online course presence? What about subsequent visits? Do you use this space effectively? A course home page is the first view of a course to your students. First impressions are lasting.
Whether you offer your course completely online, as a hybrid, or face-to-face with an online presence, here are a few suggestions you might consider:
- Make the Home page welcoming and inviting. Some faculty find it a great place to provide a short description of the course as well as a place to present a short bio of themselves and their office hours.
- Try to keep it uncluttered and well organized. Is it aesthetically pleasing to read? Perhaps consider a visual such as a course or department banner to add a sense of identity or an image of yourself or related content. The simpler you keep this page, the less confusion your students will have getting started and knowing what to do.
- If your course is completely online, remember that your students need to know how to use the site. Arrange your content so that students know where to begin. This can help set a positive tone for the course, helping students get off on the right foot.
You have several options for creating this important page. By default, the Home tool is placed in your site when it is created. The Home tool provides a space to display course information. If you use tools such as Announcements, Schedule, Forums or Chat Room a summary will be displayed on the page (see image below).
There are other options for the home page. Whichever tool is listed first in the course menubar is what the user sees when entering the site.
To learn more about other options for the home page, click the appropriate links on our Sakai Tasks or Educational Principles pages for Presentation and Usability.
Known issue: Paste from Word
| November 2, 2011 | Filed under Known Issue |
After submitting text in Sakai that contains segments coming from Microsoft Word [1], you might notice the following code onscreen.
This is because extra code is copied along with your formatted text. Your content is actually there, it’s simply below the garbled code. This known issue can easily be avoided by following these instructions:
Firefox
Use the Paste as plain text button and copy/paste the text from MS Word into the pop-up window. Reapply formatting as needed.
Do not use the Paste from Word button because formatting codes will become visible and cause problems when you go to save or publish.
Internet Explorer
Click the Paste from Word button and use CTRL-V to paste text from the .doc or .docx files (MS Word 2003 or 2007) into the pop-up window. There may be minor formatting issues.
[1] Pasting from other Microsoft Office products (e.g. Outlook, Excel, Access) might produce the same result.
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