We’re excited to announce our first big release of the year: a new way for schools to organize and manage their program curriculum within the CourseKey platform.
Before, assessments and their content could only be created at the course level. This meant admins would have to maintain one course for content creation and copy it to whichever courses needed to use it every time there was a new start. Additionally, there wasn’t a way to update assigned content if the master was updated, which forced admins to update each iteration of a question or assessment in every course it was assigned to when changes needed to be made. This caused too many headaches for our clients and our team has been hard at work building a bigger, better system for creating, organizing, and assigning content.
Read on to learn about the key changes in this release.
Admin managed vs. instructor managed content
Content is now created and managed by admins or instructors.
If your organization opts for admin managed content, program directors (or other designated admins) control the content across the curriculum by building and updating master content at the admin level and assigning it to all relevant courses across campuses.
If your school opts for instructor managed content, content creation and management will occur at the user level, meaning instructors will still create and update their own assessments.
Collections and folders
Institutions can store and share their standardized assessments for each program or campus by building collections. For example, you could choose to build one collection per program to keep the content used for, say, Medical Assisting students separate from the content for Dental Assisting students, if your school offers multiple programs.
Inside collections live “folders,” which can be associated with courses. Folders store the actual assessments students will complete, which can be further organized through subfolders. For admin managed schools, program directors can now create assessments for all the courses in their program through folders and assign them to each course that will need to use those assessments. For instructor managed schools, instructors will be able to manage folders on their own.
Assigning & updating content
Once content has been built inside of folders, it can be assigned to limitless courses by an admin from their content section. If there was a mistake that needs to be corrected or if you want to update the content of an assessment after it has been created, all you have to do is make the change in the admin content section of CourseKey and the questions will automatically be updated in every unsent assessment in course sections they’ve been assigned to.
Regardless of whether your school opts for admin managed or instructor managed content, this change will make editing existing content easier than ever and take away the headache associated with making sure the right questions get updated for every course that uses them.
Other improvements
Now, you can determine assessment by assessment which ones students can see the answers on. This will come in great use for high stakes exams to make sure students can’t share questions with students in other sections while still letting them access their answers from other assessments, like homework assignments, to use as study materials.
Plus this release will give instructors the ability to re-open an assessment ad hoc without having to schedule it if students need to make up a missed assessment.
Closing
We’re excited to provide institutions with a new, easier way to organize and manage their content, ensuring that programs at each campus are administering the same standardized assessments required for students to graduate.
