With summer semester upon us, it is now time to make sure your online course is set up and ready to go for launch day. Here are some common tasks that will help you be prepared:

Import your course materials

If you are using a master course to develop and store your course materials, importing them into your course offering space should be pretty straightforward. If you do not use a master course space, you will need to identify the course space from which you want to import your course materials. For many of you, this might be a previous offering of the course. If you are importing from a previous offering of the course, take care not to import unwanted news items or other offering-specific elements that you do not want to carry forward. Once you have identified the course you want to import materials from, you can find directions for importing the content into your course offering on CTL’s website.

Update all course due dates, start dates, etc.

Due dates associated with assignments and start/end dates associated with modules will need to be updated. This process involves going through each element of the course and checking the dates used in eLC against the course calendar for the current offering. It can be tedious, but checking all the dates upfront will help guard against confusion later.

Check links & embedded videos

If you have not taught this course since last summer, you might want to go through any links to external websites to make sure they are still functional. Additionally, if you use video from sites like YouTube or Vimeo, it is a good idea to make sure the videos still work as expected. Doing this now will give you time to find replacement resources for any websites or videos that have disappeared.

Get e-reserves set up

If you’d like to use e-reserves to allow your students to access readings, you should contact UGA Distance Librarian Lynn Cahoon (cahoonl@uga.edu) in order to get set up. E-reserves are an excellent way to provide your students with no-cost access to course materials while abiding by copyright laws.

Verify the course start date

For many of you, the default course start date is the date you want students to first access the course. However, if you want to give students early access so that they can view orientation materials (or for any other reason), you can open your course early. To change this setting, go to Edit Course –> Course Offering Information and scroll down to the Start Date section where you can enable and set the course start date to match your needs. If you choose to make orientation materials available to students ahead of the course but don’t want students to view all of your course materials, make sure to restrict access to the other modules by either setting them to “Draft” mode or placing start dates on them.