Education (instructor)
Last updated
Last updated
In most cases, it is possible to set up a course from scratch in less than 5 minutes.
Courses are spaces in Nuvolos where instructors add learning materials (data, code and applications) for their students. Organisation managers and faculty members may create courses.
Navigate to Courses
Select + NEW COURSE
Enter desired course name and description
Select + ADD SPACE
Select application
Enter desired application name
Select + ADD APPLICATION
To have a complete course setup, a list of operations is recommended to complete: uploading files, inviting students, distributing course material to the students, and creating assignments/exercises for students.
On the overview page of each course, course administrators can see the course checklist and the status of each list item (completed or pending). Below is a screenshot showing an example of a course checklist where only one item (uploading files) is completed while the other three items are pending.
Course material consists of items like code, documents, or data files that are used to support learning. The following animation shows you how to navigate to the files of the master instance and upload course material.
Alternatively, you can click on the 'Upload files' tile in the Overview course checklist and it will directly open the file upload modal.
To invite students, you can click on the 'Invite students' tile in the Overview course checklist and it will directly open the invitation dialog.
Ways to invite students to join the course :
By sharing an Invite Link (requires the least work from the instructors' side).
By e-mail (good for small courses)
Alternatively, more invitations options are available in the course users/instance view which can be opened from the sidebar as illustrated below
Invited students will be able to see only their workspace, not the master instance or other students' instances.
You can distribute the teaching material to prospective and existing students by using the distribute feature. For a very basic use case, we demonstrate how to distribute the two files uploaded previously.
The key steps of the process:
Select the objects you want to distribute
Recently used applications are automatically added to the distribution, you have the option to remove them.
Save a bundle
You can save the list of distributed objects as a named bundle for future reference, or you can also create assignments or a learning module from them.
Select the target
By default, you will distribute to all students - every existing instance and future instance.
Select distribution strategy
By default overwrite is suggested, consult the detailed distribution documentation for other options and their use cases.
Specify a notification message
Your current students will receive the message you specified to their e-mail addresses.
For instructions on how to create an assignment, please check the documentation page on assignments here.
Teaching assistants are able to see everything that is going on in the course, they have the space admin role. The user who created the course automatically becomes a space admin as well. To invite teaching assistants with this elevated role, follow the instructions below.
As described in the structure document, a space (in particular, a course) consists of multiple instances. As a space administrator of your course, you have complete control over how many instances your space might have and which students may access what instance.
In the suggested standard layout:
All instructors (professors and teaching assistants alike) control the teaching material in the master instance. In terms of roles:
The professor and designated teaching assistants have space admin role in the space and they edit material in the master instance.
Every student is invited to their own instance, each student having the following roles:
Editor role in their own personal instance.
Viewer role on the distributed instance (this is given by definition).
Group work is kept in a separate space, any specialized instances are not kept together with the standard layout.
There are many alternate layouts possible as lined out previously. A particular example that has come up in a few cases:
Some or all instructors work in separate instances.
The professor and designated teaching assistants have space admin role but agree to do course material development work in separate instances.
Every student is invited to their own instance, each student having the following roles:
Editor role in their own personal instance.
Viewer role on the distributed instance (this is given by definition).
The benefit of this layout is that the master instance never has file editing collisions.
Distributions are complicated in this setup due to the fact that instructors may override each other's work during distribution. There is additional coordination required such that inadvertent overrides do not confuse instructors working in parallel.
