By: Adrienne Sehatzadeh, Instructional Designer
Centre for Learning and Teaching

The homepage is the first impression of your course that students have, so you want to make sure it is practical, functional and easy to navigate.

The standard default course homepage is intentionally very basic with and only contains two widgets – News and Updates. You can create new homepages to reflect the way you teach or the kind of engagement with the space you would like students to have.

One way to manage the number of widgets (or placeholders) on your homepage, especially for online courses, is to have a homepage for the first week of the course which would contain instructor information and perhaps welcome video, course video tour and links to syllabus and other important information that students must access in the first week. (Most of this important information will also be available to students when they click into the course content.)

This short two-minute video might help you generate ideas on how best to build out your homepages for your courses.

Please contact one of the Instructional Designers at the Centre for Learning and Teaching at http://www.dal.ca/dept/clt/e-learning.html if you would like to consult on how best to do this. You can contact intech@dal.ca for training on how to set up your homepage(s)

To access other video resources and training materials, go to dal.ca/elearning and click on the link to training resources.