Checklist for creating acourse on edX

Birundha, Charu

IITBombayX

29 April, 2014

No. Item Description1 Create an Account in http:

//studio.edge.edx.org

Preferably, use your institu-tional E-mail address e.g.:charu@cse.iitb.ac.in.

2 Create a Course

• Capitalize first letter of a wordin a course name e.g.: ComputerProgramming and Utilization.

• Decide a course name carefullyas it will be a part of the courseURL. In case you want to changethe URL after the course hasbeen created, you have to con-tact edX through http://help.

edge.edx.org.

• Organization: If organizationname is IITBombayX, makesure there is no whitespace orany special characters in be-tween.

• Course Number: Enter bothsubject abbrevation and num-ber, for e.g.: Computer Pro-gramming and Utilization 101should be ”CPU101”.

• If your course is publishedworldwide, be sure to include“x”. If it is exclusively anon-campus offering, do not in-clude “x” e.g.: “CPU101” or“CPU101x”.

• Course Run: Instead of Spring2013, mention 2013 Term 1.

• Total number of characters inthe Course name, Organization,Course number must be lessthan or equal to 65.

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3 Course Team Member

• Instructor can invite a person asan admin or a course staff forhis/her course on edX. The per-son should be an existing mem-ber of edX.

• Admin has all the privileges toaccess the course.

• Privileges given to the CourseStaff are:

– Can edit the course

– Can delete content even ifit is created by someoneelse

4 Files and Uploads

• Uploading a file with the samename as existing one will causeoriginal file to be overwritten.

• File name becomes a part of theURL, students can see the nameof the file when they open it.

• Except videos, all files related toa course should be uploaded inFiles and Uploads.

• Files can be locked individuallyso that only enrolled people canaccess the file.

• Use Embed URL to link to thefile or image in a course.

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5 Schedules and Details

• The Course Start Time on thescreen will reflect the currenttime zone in your browser de-pending on the geographic loca-tion. Course start time for stu-dents will show as UTC (Coordi-nated Universal Time) on Edge.

• Create a course e-mail address.e.g.: cs101@cse.iitb.ac.in i.e e-mail address should be affiliatedwith your course organization.

• The coures image should be ofsize 660x240 pixels.

• Inviting students for a courseregister.

• Staff’s biography:

– Staff photo should be of110x110 pixels.

– Description about staffshould contain 75 to 100words only.

• Course Introduction:

– Long Description shouldcontain 150 to 300 words.

– Short Description shouldcontain 146 characters. Itwill appear in a course cat-alog.

6 Time Zone

• Almost all dates and time inStudio and edX are in UTC,and not in your local time zone.When you specify date and timesettings that do not have a timezone label, you need to convertvalues to UTC.

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7 Pages

• Course Schedule: preferably usegoogle calender or use HTML tocreate a dynamic schedule. Youcan also include both type of cal-endars in your course.

• Hangout:

– Only 10 students can join asingle handout.

– Staff and Students musthave a google account.

• Wiki: It is optional. You canhide it.

8 Textbooks

• The textbook can be availableon the web, or you can providethe textbook under your courseas a custom page.

– Make an existing textbookavailable.

– Use free and open text-books.

– Work with your institu-tional libraries.

• Do not use image files as theyare not accessible to screen read-ers.

9 Visibility

• Each section and subsectionhave a visibility settings.

• By default unit setting is Pri-vate. By using Preview mode,you can view your course as astudent.

• If unit setting is Public. By us-ing View Live, you can can viewyour course as a student.

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10 Section

• The instructor can set an indi-vidual release date and time foreach section in a course.

• None of the contents will be vis-ible until its release date andtime passes.

11 Subsection

• The author can set an individualrelease date for each subsectionfor a course. None of the con-tents will be visible until its re-lease date passes. If release dateis not set, the subsection will re-lease in same date as its section.

• Graded as: You can set subsec-tions as one of the assignmenttypes created when you set upgrading.

• Set a due date: Time to com-plete the assignment. Marks willnot be credited to the assign-ment if deadline passes. Graceperiod is possible if Instruc-tor/Staff wants to keep it.

12 Unit

• Unit Settings: By default, allunit settings are private. Tomake it visible to students, theInstructor/Staff have to changeunit visiblity to public.

• Unit Identifier: It is used to addlink to an external website.

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13 Discussion Component

• Community TA’s can activelyparticipate in discussion.

• Actively the author, TA’s canupvote a post, report form forabuse and follow post for up-dates.

14 HTML Component

• Use Embed URL to link to addimages or files in your course.

• You should not add customstyles or scripts in the HTMLcode view in the visual editor.

15 Problem Component

• In common problem types, youcan create the content in Visualor HTML or Advanced editor i.eXML.

• You cannot create a content inHTML or Visual mode, once youchange a mode to Advanced ed-itor in common problem types.

• In Advanced Problem it directlyopens the advanced editor.

• Be careful when you modifyproblems after they have beenreleased. Two ways to solve thisproblem:

– Increase the number of at-tempts for the problem.Ask students to redo theproblem.

– Delete the previous quizand create a new one.

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16 Video component

• The edX video player supportsvideos in .mp4, .ogg, and .mpegformat.

• All the course related videosshould be uploaded on Youtube.

• Video should be less than 15minutes.

• If you encode at 0.75 speedoption, make sure that sourcevideo segments are only 11.25minutes long, so that YouTubecan host all speeds.

• We recommend you to postcopies of your videos on a third-party site such as Amazon S3 in-case YouTube is not available.

• Transcript starts playing au-tomatically with your videoswhich are in the .srt format.

• Capturing quality audio is themost important technical aspectof creating a good video. Hereare some guidelines:

– It is important to use anexternal microphone. Mostexternal microphones arefine.

– Proximity of the micro-phone is more importantthan the microphone qual-ity.

– Don’t forget to turn it on.Test it out before begin-ning.

– Before recording, makesure the volume is cor-rectly adjusted.

– Make sample recordingsand have someone else givefeedback about the soundquality.

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General guidelines:

• Speak comfortably fast. Stu-dents can use our multispeedfunction to slow down or speedup your speech.

• Look directly into the camera.Imagine a person where thecamera is and imagine a conver-sation.

• For tablet capture: Imagine youare sitting next to your student,explaining the material.

• It may be helpful to record withan audience present.

• For tablet capture: If you makea mistake, stop for a second andthen restart the last sentence.In the Tutorial ”How to Cre-ate a Tablet Capture,” you willsee the raw footage for the ”edXHighlights” video. You can seein that video the drastic effectthat good editing can have.

17 Grading

• Decide whether grace periodneed to be used or not.

• Note: Setting a grace period isgenerally not recommended. Itcan lead to problems not closing“when they should”, and may bemisleading to your students.

• Problems do not count towardsa student’s grade, unless you setthe subsection as a graded as-signment type.

• If you change an assignmenttype name in the Grading page,make sure the assignment typenames on the Course Outlineshould match.

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18 Manual policy For including specialized problemsand for assessment, changes need tobe done in Advanced Settings.

19 Assessment

• Open response assess-ment(ORA) is still in betaversion

• The number of responses to begraded:

– Calibration for a peer as-sessment requires at least20 instructor-graded re-sponses.

– For AI assessment Algo-rithm requires at least100 instructor-graded re-sponses.

20 Import a Course This feature should be used with cau-tion. Importing a new course will re-place the current uploaded course con-tent. Importing a course cannot beundone.

Note: Using copyrighted material without permission is more problematic in

this context than in the classroom because there is much more public visibility.

Please do not use copyrighted material without proper license. This includes

stock footage, images, documents, and other graphic representations (such as

video games) not available under Creative Commons.

[1]

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ANNEXURE

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References

[1] “Building and running an edx course

http://edx.readthedocs.org/projects/ca/en/latest/index.html.”

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