Use this checklist to prepare your Quercus course for the start of term. It highlights the essential tasks for organizing your course, setting up assessments and grading, communicating with students, and publishing your course before classes begin.
- Log in to Quercus with your UTORid and password to access your courses.
- If you don't see your courses on your Dashboard, first follow the steps to Check under "All Courses" in our guide What should I do if I can't see my courses?
- If you are still not able to see you course, contact your departmental ROSI administrator
- Review the Quercus Course Life Cyle information for a timeline of events for Quercus course and a list of suggested tasks for each point in that timeline.
- Customize the list of courses that appear on your Dashboard for quick access to the courses you use the most.
- Cross-list (combine) multiple sections of the same course (such as multiple lecture, tutorial, practicum, or lab sections) to combine the enrollments into a single course for easier communication and sharing of course content across sections.
You don't have to start building your new course from scratch! You can save some time by reusing a previously built course.
- Copy (import) existing content from another Quercus course (or from a template course). You can import the entire course or specific content.
- See if there's an available Quercus template that works for your course. For available course templates, see Is there a Quercus course template that I can download?
- Edit the content in new course.
If you are importing a public course template, your course will inherit some settings from the imported course template, including course visibility and content license settings. Be sure to review and change these settings accordingly, as detailed in the Review your course Visibility and Content License settings section of our guide, How do I import a course template?
Modules (see what are modules?) can keep content organized for your students and help them see a linear progression of the course. You can choose to organize modules by weeks, units, chapters, topics or whatever organizational structure works for your course.
- Add modules to your course (see How do I add a module?)
- Add course content such as files, assignments, discussions, quizzes, and links to your modules.
- Add your course Syllabus in a prominent location (such as an introductory Module or a Home Page) to share important information such as grading schemes, assessments, contact information, and course expectations. If you're teaching an online course, view our Update your Syllabus for Online page for important information and sample statements to include in your syllabus.
The Home Page is the first thing students see when they enter your course. You can choose from one of five different layouts for your Home Page, depending on your preference and needs. You can find some Example Home Pages in our FASE Course Template.
- Create a custom homepage (see creating a Content Page). If you choose to design the page yourself, you can customize the page to include images, text to welcome your students, and important links and information.
- Set a Page as your course homepage (also known as the front page)
Assignments and the Gradebook are tightly integrated in Quercus. Creating a graded assignment is the only way to create a column in the Gradebook.
- Review the different Assignment types available in Quercus (including Assignments, Discussions, and Quizzes)
- Organize your assignments into Assignment Groups for weighted grading.
- Confirm your Grade Posting Policy is set appropriately for your course.
Group Assignments: When copying group assignments from a previous Quercus course, ensure you manually re-select the correct Group Set for the assignment in the current course, even if it has the same name. Otherwise, the assignment won’t be properly linked to the group, causing submissions to appear individually in SpeedGrader and no submission notifications to be sent to group members. To learn about potential issues when the Group Set is not properly updated, refer to our Faculty Question of the Week: Why does my group assignment show individual submissions in SpeedGrader?
Grade Posting Policy: This policy that allows you to define if grades are posted automatically or manually, at both the course or assignment level. By default, all new Quercus courses have the Grade Posting Policy set to manual, meaning grades remain hidden from students until you choose to release them. However, if you've imported content from a previous course with an automatic grade posting policy, this setting will carry over.
If you have additional course staff (e.g., TAs) that aren't enrolled in your course via ROSI, then you will need to manually enroll them. Instructors and students should NOT be enrolled manually.
- Enroll Teaching Assistants (TAs), Graders, or other course staff into your course.
- Review Course Roles and Permissions.
Once you have everything ready you can publish your course to enable those enrolled to see it. Until the course is published, enrolled people will not see or be updated on your course.
- Confirm that your course looks the way you think it looks with the Student View.
- Publish your course so students can access it.
- Remember to also publish modules and individual items (e.g., Pages, Assignments, Discussions) to make them visible to students.
You can use the Announcements tool (see what is an announcement?) to send a message to all the students in your course.
- Send an announcement (see how to add an announcement to a course).
- Attach files or embed a video in your announcements.
- Proactively schedule announcement sending (see delay the posting of your announcement by scheduling the announcement for a future date).
- Show the most recent announcements in your course Home Page.
Note: Your course must be published for students to receive announcement notifications. Notifications are not sent for announcements created before the course has been published. For more information on announcement notifications, refer to our Faculty Question of the Week: Will students see a Quercus announcement I post before I publish my course?
If you have additional questions about start-of-term tasks for your Quercus course, email us at [email protected] or schedule a consultation.
You are done. Great job!