Technology Tip of the Week - December 20, 2005

Reusing Consolidated Courses

The consolidated course feature in Pipeline is a wonderful addition for faculty who utilize Pipeline courses to distribute their documentation and links each semester. A few weeks after each semester ends all courses and their data are deleted from the server to make room for the next set of courses. This means that if you store your syllabus, handouts, PowerPoint presentations and resource links within an individual course all this content will be deleted at the end of the semester. However, if you store your course content within a consolidated course space and link each course into it, none of the content stored in that space will be deleted. This allows you to add individual courses each semester to the consolidated course and all of the content held in the consolidated course will be automatically transferred to the new courses. This is such a great time-saver! You can create a consolidated course for multiple sections of the same course or for just one course. Not only is your content populated automatically but you also get a master list of all the class e-mail addresses from all the linked courses.

One thing to keep in mind is the importance of removing the individual courses from the consolidated course space at the end of each semester before they are deleted by the system. This is critical because if you leave last semester's courses attached to the consolidated course and the individual courses are deleted from the server at the end of the semester it breaks the links and causes an error in the consolidated course. This makes it impossible to re-use the consolidated course the following semester and you lose all your hard work. To get around this you must remove these courses before they are deleted from the server. (Note that this will just remove the link between the individual courses and the consolidated course - you will still be able to access the individual courses and the consolidated course shell separately.)

To remove old courses from a consolidated course shell:

Click on the My Courses tab.

Select a term from the drop-down arrow next to Course Schedule. All the links to your courses will be displayed.

Click on a link in the top right of the screen to the My Consolidated Courses.

Click on the link to the consolidated course you wish to modify

Once inside the consolidated group space, you will see all the attached courses listed on the right side of the window. To remove a course from the group, scroll down to the Configuration Tools menu on the left side of the screen and choose the Courses link.

Click next to all the courses to select them.

When all the courses have been checked, click on the grey Remove button.

The consolidated course links should now be removed. This shell is now ready for you to add the new semester's courses.

For more detailed information on creating and modifying consolidated courses please see: http://it.ccri.edu/Documentation/pipeline/Course_consolidator.shtml

The Instructional Support staff wishes you all a wonderful holiday.

These tips are provided by the Department of Information Technology instructional support team. If you have any questions on these tips, or wish to offer your own, please feel free to contact Linda Beith at lbeith@ccri.edu. View an archive of past technology tips