#06 – Tips & Tricks for Designing and Structuring your TeachCenter Course

with Sections, Text and Media areas, Images and Completion Tracking

Many lecturers at the TU Graz are already experienced with using the TeachCenter but would like to make their courses more appealing and structured. Although the TeachCenter already predetermines many formatting options, lecturers have additional possibilities to structure
their courses more clearly and to visually enhance them with simple design elements. In this article, the following four design features will be introduced:

Sections
Labels
Images
Completion tracking

Using Sections for Structuring

Sections are areas that can contain various TeachCenter activities. When a TeachCenter course is newly created, it consists of a General section and an empty section. Teachers can rename these (click on the name of the section), add as many new sections as they wish (click on the plus sign) and delete all sections except the General section (three-dot menu next to the section > Delete).

To edit your TeachCenter course you always have to activate the edit mode beforehand via the slider at the top right.

One main advantage of using several sections is the clear structure of the course content –both for lecturers and students.

There are several ways to organize your course by creating sections and editing their names:

thematically: creating a section for each topic
by participants: add a section for each group and unlock them only for the respective goup (three-dot menu next to the section > Edit settings > Restrict access: choose the group)
chronologically: create a new section for every week of the course

If you create a new section for each week of the course, arrange the sections from the newest to the oldest so that students do not have to scroll as long to find the latest documents and assignments.

Hiding, expanding and collapsing sections
Sections can be hidden (three-dot menu next to the section > Hide). Hidden sections are not visible to students; for teachers they are grey yet can still be edited. By clicking on Collapse all or Expand all at the top, all sections can be opened or closed.

Use the ”hide“ feature to fill your TeachCenter course with content in advance and release the content gradually throughout the semester. This way, the course will not be overly filled at the beginning of the semester and remains clear and organized.

Structure activities within a section using subsections

By default, activities and documents within a section are simply listed one below the other and can be moved up or down using drag and drop when edit mode is enabled.

You can create a horizontal structure using subsections, which you can insert like sections within sections.

On the left, an unstructured TeachCenter course. On the right, subsections were used, items are hidden and the sections are named

Fig. 1: from unstructured to structured TeachCenter course

Using Text and Media Areas for Descriptions

You can insert a text and media area to describe which materials students can find in a section and what to do with these materials (Add an activity or resource > text and media area). Text within a text area can be formatted using the WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get)-editor or the source code view. You can add:

different font colours
bold/italics/underline
different paragraph styles
bullet points

You can insert a horizontal line within the label by changing to the source code view (View > Source Code) and inserting “<hr>” (without quotation marks) at the desired position.

The advantage of a text and media area over a section description is flexibility. Text areas can be edited and moved more easily than a section description.

One of the advantages for students is that expectations can be clearly communicated by a detailed description of the task or section in a text and media area. Additionally, images and icons can be added to text and media areas.

Liven up a TeachCenter Course with Images

You can use the opportunity to include images, for example to introduce the lecturers with pictures and a short description in the first section.

Images or icons can be inserted in a label via the menu bar in the "What you see is what you get"-editor.

Fig. 2: Menu of the text editor in TeachCenter

Keep in mind to also include an alternative text for your images to provide accessibility.

Activity Completion Tracking

Sections in which students are to complete several related tasks one after the other might look unorganized despite having named the sections and having used labels for descriptions. In this case, you can activate completion tracking for all activities that will be added to this course in the future:

Settings tab in the course menu
in the section Completion tracking: Enable completion tracking: Yes

In the settings for an activity (assignment, checkmarks, documents etc.) you can now select that the completion will be marked manually or automatically (for example by submitting). On the main page of the course, students will then see a new button next to the activity to mark as completed, or with information what the conditions to complete the activity are.

This benefits the students as they can precisely track which tasks they have already completed.