As an Instructor, the Course Manager will be your primary tool for pushing out class content to your students, monitoring student activity, grading student submissions, and organizing your students into separate sections and courses.
You will find the option to link your course to Moodle in the Course Manager.
Accessing the Course Manager
You can find the Course Manager by clicking the triple-dot menu on the top right, selecting Utilities, and then clicking Course Manager. After you create a course, you can click the Course Manager shortcut icon,, which will appear in the top-right of the screen.
A new tab will open, and you will be brought to the LabArchives Welcome Page. Click Create Your New Course Now to get started.
Click any option in the top-right corner at any time to save your progress.
Connecting your course to Moodle
If your institution has enabled LabArchives as an external tool for Moodle, you will have the choice to connect it to your course. To do so, click Yes, then Next. You can always go back and connect your course after selecting No or I want more information before I decide.
- Setting up the Course Information
- You will need to give your new course a title.
Tip: Be sure to use the same name as the course to be linked in Moodle.
- The course description is an optional field for your internal use only.
- Select the notebook on which to you want base your students’ notebook. We refer to this as your Instructor Notebook. (For more information about how to set up your course notebook, click here)
Tip: In your Instructor Notebook, be sure to name assignments in the notebook the same as their corresponding assignment in Moodle.
- In the Course Information area there are 5 additional choices, you are free to turn any of these items on or off anytime in the duration of your course:
- Allow students to share their notebook with other students. This is turned on by default. This is great for collaboration if students are working in groups and you want them to be able to work in each others’ notebooks.
- Allow students to sign pages in their notebook. This is turned off by default. This option freezes the page and will not allow anyone, including the instructor to edit the page any further. Most instructors prefer to use the assignment page locking option listed below instead of this.
- Allow teaching assistants to add or delete sections. This is turned off by default. The instructor can permit teaching assistants to add or delete sections of a course.
- Lock assignment page when the assignment is submitted. This is turned on by default. When students submit an assignment, the page will be locked and they will no longer be able to edit any entries on the page until the page is graded or unlocked by the instructor or teaching assistant.
- Show comments automatically for students and teaching assistants. This is turned on by default. When an instructor or teaching assistant comments on a student’s notebook, the comment will be shown automatically when the student returns back to the page.
- Important Note: We recommend having one assignment entry per page. If you have the locking feature turned on for your course and create more than one assignment entry on the page, students will not be able to submit the other assignment(s) on the same page.
2. Creating Sections
To add sections to your course, type in a section name, a description (optional), and then click Add. After you create one section, you have the ability to add additional sections, edit current section names and description, and delete sections.
Note: Section information in LabArchives is not carried over in Moodle or vice versa.
3. Add Teaching Assistants
You can manually add TAs or co-instructors to the course. If your TA is already listed in Moodle, you do not need re-add them here. TA’s will be added once they have clicked through an assignment in Moodle.
To add a Teaching Assistant manually, fill in the emails (separated by commas, enters, semi-colons, etc.) in the field, and click “add”. The “Test” button checks if it’s a valid email and if the user already exists in the course. The Teaching Assistants will receive an email with an activation link.
You can assign your TA to a specific section of the course and you can always add additional TAs, change their assigned section, or remove them.
4. Adding Students to your Course
Your students will automatically be added to The LabArchives Course Manager once they have clicked through a Moodle assignment.
After your students have been added, you can change their assigned section.
Once you are done adding information to your course, click Save Course and Exit.
Creating or Accessing Other Courses
Click +Add New Course in the top right corner of the screen to create another course. To access another course, click on the name of the current course, and a drop-down menu will appear with your other courses.