Don't waste your time
Minimising the time it takes to set up and maintain your learn.gold area
Why you should read this
We consider the following need-to-know for anybody who edits a learn.gold area. As well as opening up learning and teaching opportunities, we want learn.gold to help with the operational side. We definitely want to avoid learn.gold taking up undue time.
Upload in bulk rather than file after file
See step by step instructions for bulk uploads.
Manage your area's Files space
- Unless you take deliberate action, your Files space becomes hard to use. See our guidance on how to make your area's Files space easy to maintain.
- Important: avoid breaking links by organising your files into folders and choosing (brief, informative) names for them before making links to them.
Consider learn.gold Web pages instead
How to compose 'native' learn.gold Web pages instead of uploading and linking to the documents; when and why this helps.
Avoid many links from your area's front page
Reasons: they take a lot of maintenance; when you have a lot on the front page it's hard to make anything salient. Instead, move them down a level:- create learn.gold Web Pages or Databases (ask us) of links to web resources
- organise uploaded files into folders and link to the folders
Use learn.gold for assessed work
If you collect work in electronic format, learn.gold makes it easy to securely and privately collect the work, as well as return feedback (including direct annotations to the text or feedback in different media) and marks using learn.gold. At a glance you can see who has submitted, whose work you have marked. Submissions can be anonymous. Find out more in our demonstration area's section on the Assignment tool, and get in touch.
Set up Groups
Most people are bamboozled by learn.gold Groups until they take the trouble to find out how convenient they are for communication, collaboration and tutor allocation in a single learn.gold activity.
See our How To... Guide on Groups (pdf format).
Pre-empt frequently-asked questions
In learn.gold you could use a Glossary to pre-empt frequently-asked questions and explain course jargon, at a click.
Glossary automatically links tricky words, as they occur, to their definition. Find out more about Glossary and see it in action by visiting our demonstration course area.
Let learn.gold send your emails
Take advantage of learn.gold forums for communicating information and keeping a record for easy reference and review. See our How To.. Guide on communications in learn.gold (pdf format).
At the same time, avoid bloated inboxes by:
- reserving email for need-to-know messages and only using the News Forum for these;
- allowing students to opt into / out of email from other forums;
- changing your Profile settings to receive single digests of forum emails, rather than many individual emails.
Make sign-ups easy
- Use learn.gold's Choice or Wiki tools to for student sign-up (e.g. to book tutorial slots, or self-organise into groups).
- Find out more about learn.gold's Choice (a polling tool) or Wiki (a shared authoring environment) in our demonstration course area.
Navigate your front page without scrolling
See our FAQ on how to avoid scrolling in long learn.gold front pages.