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Course Organization

Folders are crucial for students being able to access the relevant and current resources in your course. Please identify your folders with a meaningful title and heading. Other options include color coding certain folders. Try and envision how students will navigate the structure of your course to find what they need. A good rule of thumb is that the first page of the course should contain folders, under which all of your course content resides. Common strategies include:

  • Organizing by unit, project, or topic — this helps students find both the currently active resources and past activities or resources they may wish to revisit
  • Folders for certain date ranges, or
  • Folders for types of material (e.g., Homework, Readings, Daily Practice)

If there is a resource, link, or activity that students will need to access regularly throughout the course, consider putting it in a separate folder (such as "Toolkit" or "Common Resources") at the top of your page.

Keep materials no more than three levels deep: students should never need more than two clicks from your course home page to reach a resource — your course (level 1) → a unit or topic folder (level 2) → at most one more folder of related materials (level 3). If you find yourself nesting folders inside folders inside folders, it's a sign to flatten your structure.

Be careful with "Unpublish." Unpublishing a folder hides it (and the assignments inside it) from students, but your gradebook will still display the grade — unpublishing doesn't remove an item from grade calculations. If you want an item excluded from grade calculations entirely, use the assignment's Count in Grade option instead. Don't use Unpublish as a way to tidy up a cluttered course; archive old folders instead, or ask June if you're not sure which to use.

The Updates Thread​

The Updates section is a running chronological conversation. Students can post here too — it's a common place for students to ask questions of each other, or to share files or resources, as well as for you to ask questions or share information separate from an assignment or specific class activity.