File talk:Informal walkthrough of using course pages in early 2013.ogv
Hi, I'm Sage
I'm going to walk through how to create course pages, and how to use their key features, with the new system we're using for 2013.
This assumes that you've already gone through the Wikipedia training modules, and your account has already been set up with the Course Instructor or Ambassador user rights. If not, the course pages module has instructions for you.
The first step is, go to the page Special:Institutions. This lists the colleges and universities that are in the system. If you've got the user rights, you'll be able to add your own, if it's not there. So we'll add "Example College".
Fill in the details, press Submit, and it's in the system.
(And in this case, the entry I just added isn't showing up yet, and there's this note about "viewing a cached version of this page". If something you expect isn't showing up on a list for this system, check for that, and then you can press "View latest" to refresh it.
So, now we have our entry.)
In the institution page, there's a list of courses, and at the bottom we can Add a course. We put in a course name (Test Course), and a term. For traditional Spring 2013 courses, put 2013 Q1. And then click Add course, and
there's a form to fill out the details. Title and course page should be filled automatically, and you should leave that as it is. (Changing it will result in moving the course page.)
Enrollment token is where you can enter a code of your choosing, which users will have to enter to sign up as a student for this course. So send that code to your students, and they can enroll with it. If you leave it blank, any user will be able to enroll on the course page.
Make sure you put in start and end dates; a lot of features get disabled for courses that are not in between their start and end dates. You might want to leave the start date as today, so that it shows up as a current course immediately.
Then field of study and course level: choose something from the pulldown, or type in what you need. Then set the course language (English).
The Description box basically works like any wiki page. You can put any sort of wiki code in here to add info about your course. At the bare minimum, you should add a detailed description of what the students will be doing on Wikipedia, and what the key due dates for assignment milestones will be. If you have a full timeline, you can add that as well. The audience for this may include your students, but it's critical to have good info here for other Wikipedia editors, so they can understand the context when they see edits from your students.
You don't need to have it all ready immediately, though. You can put in the basics now, and make changes later. Press Submit,
and your course page is live. Now you'll need to add yourself as an instructor. I encourage you to also enroll as a student, so that your own edits become part of the course feed along with your students.
Once there are students enrolled, there will be a students table at the bottom, where a student can add articles they are working on, and add themselves as peer reviewers for the articles of classmates. (On cached pages, the option to add oneself as a reviewer will be grayed out, so students may need to click "View latest" at the top before they can sign up as a reviewer for a classmate.)
One of the key features of these pages is the MyCourses feed, which you can find at Special:MyCourses. A link to it will show up beside your watchlist link, if you
go to Preferences, then Misc, and then click "Show a link to your courses at the top of every page." and Save it.
This Courses feed shows activity by students (and ambassadors) in articles and talk pages and user talk pages, so you can keep track of what students are doing. Currently, it includes Ambassadors, but if they are very active editors, their edits will dominate the feed, so you may want to ask them to unlist themselves on the course page if that's happening. We're going to change the software to only show student edits, but for now, you may need to work around it by removing the ambassadors.
You can find some other miscellaneous features by going to Special:SpecialPages, and then browsing the Education section. Most of these are not particularly relevant to instructors, at this time, although we'll probably be building some more features that may be useful. For Ambassadors, note the Campus Ambassador Profile and Online Ambassador Profile. Those are special pages where you can set up an Ambassador profile, which gets listed on the respective Ambassadors page. If you're an ambassador, please do set one of these up for yourself.
That's it for the basics. If you have questions, need help related to course pages, or have any specific feedback for user interface or features you need, please leave a message on my talk page. I'm Sage Ross (WMF). We're trying to squash bugs and improve this system, so any and all feedback is welcome.
Good luck!
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