Audience: Editing Trainers and Content Creators
Topic:
There are eight different course formats that can be used when making a course: Custom sections, Weekly sections, Single activity, Social, Grid, Onetopic format, Tiles, and Collapsed Topics.
Why is it Important?
Course formats display information to users in a variety of ways. There are advantages and limitations for each course format option.
Tutorial & Examples:
- Log in to the Wildland Fire Learning Portal and go to a course you are enrolled as and Editing Trainer in.
- Click on "Settings".
- Scroll down to "Course format" and toggle it open.
- Click the dropdown next to "Format".
Depending on your screen orientation, the dropdown will be located to the right of "Format" or directly underneath.
- Select the course format you want to use.
There are eight course formats to choose from: Custom sections, Weekly sections, Single activity, Social, Grid, Onetopic format, Tiles, and Collapsed Topics.
Each course "Format" has different settings that appear under the "Course format" section.
- The page will reload and the "Course format" section will show the specific settings associated with the format you chose.
- Adjust the settings to best suit the needs for your course.
- Scroll to the bottom of the Settings page and click "Save and return" or "Save and display".
Custom sections
The course is divided into customizable sections that an Editing Trainer can give titles to. You can add content and activities in each section. This is the default format.
Tip: This is great to use if your course is objective based and each objective may take different amounts of time to complete. An example of this would be scaffolding where the Learners are building upon the knowledge from earlier topics.
Weekly sections
The course is organized into sections corresponding to each week of the course, beginning from the course start date. You can add content, forums, quizzes, and so on in the section for each week. The current week is highlighted.
Tip: If you want all your Learners to work on the same materials at the same time, this would be a good format to choose.
Note: Make sure your course start date is correct. If it is not, your weeks will have the wrong date on it. This is especially important if you are restoring a course to use with a new section of Learners.
If you have Learners starting the course at different times, you can use the feature Course relative dates to display dates for each course section relative to the Learner's start date in the course.
Single activity
The single activity format only has 1 section, and allows the Editing Trainer to add only one activity or resource to the course. When the single activity format is selected, a drop down menu appears for the Editing Trainer to choose the activity they wish to use.
The Single activity format with a forum as the activity and Social format are very similar. The only difference is when the course contains other activities. The single activity format displays them as "orphaned" and for Editing Trainers only; the social format displays them in an activities block and available for Learners.
Social
This format is oriented around one main forum which appears listed on the main page. It is useful for situations that are more free form. They may not even be traditional courses.
When selecting the social format, you can specify how many discussions to display on the course page.
The social forum can be edited by clicking the 'Update this forum' button on the social forum page. The forum introduction is displayed at the top of the course page. Activities and resources can be added on the side by using the Social activities block.
Grid
The Grid course format is a modular and visual course format. It creates a grid of icons (one for each topic/section) with short titles. Clicking on an icon brings up the content from the corresponding topic in a "lightbox" style display.
Onetopic format
The onetopic format shows each topic in a tab. You can have multiple tabs, or just one. Only one tab's contents can be displayed at a time.
Tiles
The tiles format displays course topics as "Tiles", rather than as a list. When clicked, tile content is displayed under the tile with an animated transition. The layout adapts to different screen sizes and orientations. Within each tile, activities can be set to display as "sub-tiles". Icons for each tile can be selected from a a list located in the settings (the Editing Trainer does not need to upload them).
Collapsed Topics
An interchangeable topic or week-day based format that solves the issue of the 'Scroll of Death' when a course has many topics / weeks. All sections except zero have a toggle that displays that section. One or more sections can be displayed at any given time.