On the Gateway page there is an under-utilized but very cool marketing tool: the Sites feature. If a prospective student or other interested person wants to find an ETUDES-NG class and learn more about the class, they can search using the Sites feature. Anyone can do this . . . since it is located on the Gateway page, there is no need to log into the system before browsing around.

Click on the Sites link in the left nav menu.

The Search for Sites dialog box appears. You can search for courses by any term by choosing the term from the drop-down menu. Or you can leave the default at Any to find courses offered throughout the year.

If you want to search by subject matter or school, type that informatioin into the Search for: box.

You will need to know a school's abbreviation to search by school, so it may be better to search for Any, and then from the list you'll be able to tell what the abbreviation for the school you're interested in is. For example, Foothill College's abbreviation is FH.

Then click on the Search for Sites button.

The Results page will list all the courses that meet your criteria. On the list above, you can see that 26 sites were found that met my criteria. Currently the page is showing 20 items, but that can be changed to show 50, 100 or 200 sites per page.

The search was for Any schools offering Art, so in the list above it shows two schools: COS and FH. Right now all the courses are in development (not currently active). Only the first course listed has a short description telling folks what the course is about. That information is created by the instructor as described below.

To view information about the course, click on the course title in the list.

 

The course description above is a great example. It is quite complete and gives the searcher a good idea of what the course will be about and what requirements for the course include. In addition, it contains a public resource link to a website the instructor wants prospective students to know about. This will help prevent having students enroll in the class only to find out that their equipment won't work with the course material.

 

Where Does This Information Come From?

The information that appears on a Sites Class Page is created by you, the instructor. There are four areas where you can make information available to the public: Announcements, Syllabus, Resources and Site Info. You will be investigating these areas in much more detail in other sections, but this is a brief introduction.

Announcements Tool

Syllabus Tool
Resource Tool
As you can see, each of the above three tools has a slightly different look to it when it comes to choosing to make the notice publicly viewable. That's OK, they all work. When you create an announcement, a syllabus item, or a resource, just be sure to check the correct option if you want it to be available to the public. By default, these items are NOT publicly viewable.

Course Descriptions

There are actually two course descriptions: a long and a short. The long course description can also be viewed on the course home page. The short course description only appears in the Sites area in the list of classes. Both course descriptions area created in the Site Info tool (Site Info >> Edit Site Information). This tool will be described in much more detail in a later module.

What you see on the left is the Edit Site Information box (located in Site Info).

The long course description goes in the top white box. You can be as elaborate here as you wish. I copied my description from a Word document and pasted it here.

The short course description goes in the lower white box. As you can see, there is an 80 character limit in this box.

The course short description shows in the list of courses. This is the ONLY place where it appears.

The course long description shows on the class page (click on the title of the course in the list of classes). If you have made any announcements, resources or syllabus items public, they will also show up here.

As you can see below, if you have loaded a photo to show on your home page (discussed in a later section), the image AND the course description both appear here in the Sites class page.

If you wish to search for another class after you've completed one search already, click on the Search link at the top of the list of classes window. You may need to Return to List to see it if you've viewed a class page.

5/20/06