Did you know that GSE offers a 14 Unit Course Template in UBlearns which is available to all faculty?

The Course Template is designed and set up to reflect effective instructional design strategies for online learning while making your job setting up your course much quicker. The template contains both ready-to-use resources as well as directions on how to customize resources to meet your specific needs. Here are a few highlights of what the GSE 14 Unit Course Template can do for you:

GSE Branding

An important aspect of engaging our students is making them feel comfortable and at home. The GSE Course Template includes a GSE banner to offer a sense of community and belonging for all students who enter your course. You may also elect to add the banner for your specific department for an even greater impact. If you are unsure how to change the banner, or where you can locate your specific departments banner, view GSE Banners – directions.

Syllabus & Course Information

The GSE Course Template comes preloaded with up to date Course Syllabus and Course Schedule Templates. The templates are updated every semester to reflect to correct dates to coincide with the academic calendar of each semester. Additionally, we ensure all policies, support information, and links are updated with each semester to avoid finding out after it’s too late. If you don’t wish to use the entire course template you can still take advantage of the course syllabus template (Summer ’18, Fall ’18) and the course schedule template (Summer ’18, Fall ’18).

Weekly Units

Weekly Unit folders are preloaded into the course template and each semester the availability dates are updated to accurately reflect the academic calendar. Simply add your weekly content to the preloaded folders and your course material will become available to students as they need it.

Getting Started

In addition to the weekly folders, there is a folder in the Weekly Units section of the template entitled Getting Started. The getting started folder is available to students immediately upon entry into the course and is set up to remain available throughout. Inside the Getting Started folder, students will find Resources for Online Learning, a Browser Checker for UBlearns, and an example of a greeting from you, the instructor, as to what is expected of the student prior to Week 1. It’s recommended that you keep these resources in your course to ensure students are prepared for when the first week begins. You may decide to add additional material to this folder as well.

Commonly Used Discussion Boards

There are three commonly used discussion boards preloaded into the Template Course that the instructional design team recommends you include in your course:

• Questions for the instructor – Please post any questions for your instructor here. This forum will be open for the entire duration of the course.
• Student Meeting Space – Use this area to allow students to ask questions of a general nature to their fellow classmates to answer
• Introductions – This is a typical Week 1 exercise to allow students to introduce themselves, get to know their classmates, and also familiarize (or re-familiarize) themselves with navigating discussions in UBlearns.

You are welcome to remove or edit any discussion boards or other content found in the course template to better suit you and your student’s needs.

Why do we recommend using the GSE 14 Unit Course Template?

We recommend the use of the course template for two main reasons.

First, the course template is intended to save you time as the instructor. We have done much of the course setup and maintenance so that you can spend more time focusing on the course content and less time with setup and organization in UBlearns.

The second reason we recommend using the course template is for ease of use on the student’s behalf. The more faculty that use the course template the more comfortable students will become with the layout and functionality. That means fewer emails and questions you’ll have to answer because students will become accustomed to knowing where to find the information they need.

How can I start using the GSE 14 Unit Course Template?

The GSE Course Template is available as a .ZIP file that can be downloaded and then imported into any UBlearns course shell. For step-by-step directions, please see the Steps for Importing a Course Template user guide.

Please note that the .ZIP file that will be used during the import process will be updated every semester to include the current semester’s dates. If you download and save the .ZIP file for Spring 2017 and import using the same file in the future, you would have to go in and manually change the dates of availability for each weekly folder.

IMPORTANT

Many faculty members already use the Course Template and are enrolled in the Course Template in UBlearns as Course Builders. This allowed you to perform a Course Copy to transfer the template into your course shell. Although you may currently have access to the Course Template in UBlearns, this process will no longer be used beyond this semester, so you will not have access to the Course Template in UBlearns in the future. The reason for the change in the process is in an effort to protect the Course Template from being inadvertently edited or changed by users when they are accessing it to perform the course copy.

If you have any questions regarding the GSE Course Template or any other instructional design needs, I encourage you to reach out to the GSE Online Instructional Design team.