Course Management
How to create, manage and administer courses
Here we present the typical use cases for managing course and subcourses for the Learning Activity Management System (LAMS).
This guide covers all the features regarding course management up until LAMS version 4.0. Most, if not all, of the features presented in the manual required system administration permission for LAMS.
LAMS Courses
Courses correspond to Course offerings.
That is University courses that students can enrol to take classes. For instance, if you are a student at a University, you might enrol in courses that are part of the degree you are pursuing. For instance, if you are a Biology student, you could enrol into the "Microbiology" course.
Now say the Microbiology course might have a weekly lecture and two tutorial classes during the week in which the tutors help the students with their weekly practical test/experiments, etc. Each student then attends the lecture and only one tutorial a week. Each student is allocated to only one tutorial class.
Microbiology (by Professor Yoichi Takayama) -> Wednesday Tutorial -> Friday Tutorial Course and subcourses are the actual "units" where the teaching occurs and both of them are containers of people that have a role (or roles) with these courses/subcourses. (See Roles for further details)
Users are created in LAMS first and are then assigned to particular courses and classes. If a user is a member of lecture or tutorial subcourse, they are also a member of the course containing that class.
Course Statuses
There are four Course statuses:
Active
Hidden
Archived
Removed
An Active Course is a current course and therefore running lessons for this course are to be shown in the course page.
The Hide Course status completely hides the course to teachers and students.
When a course is Archived, the course does not longer show in the course page instead. They are not deleted from the systems database (as they are kept for legal purposes). A System Admin is able to change the course status back to Active or Hidden.
A Removed Course means that all student records, lesson and subcourses are deleted from the database. Once a status has changed to Removed it cannot be reversed. Only System Admins can remove courses.
Course properties
Courses have the following properties
Course managers can add new users When this option is enabled, course manager are able to manually create users for their course (see create user manually)
Course managers can browse all users in the system When enabled, it allows the course manager to add users into the course by browsing all existing users in the system. Note that this property on its own does not permit course managers to create new users -only add existing ones.
Course managers can change status of course Course manager are able to change the course status (see course statuses)
Enable organisation notifications Enables course notifications so lecturers can send notifications on students on numerous course events (ie: adding a lesson, reminders for lesson completion, etc).
Enable Gradebook for learners When enabled, students are able to access their lesson resources in their gradebooks.
Enable single activity lessons Allows lecturers to create a single activity lesson.
Enable live edit Enables lecturers to modify ongoing lesson.
Enable Kumalive Enables features for on-the-spot polls and surveys. Similar to on classroom clickers or Kahoot.
LAMS User Roles
There are two sets of roles: global (system) roles and course-based roles:
Global Roles
System Administrator
Course Administrator
Course based roles
Course Manager
Author
Monitor
Learner
Global Roles
System Administrator
Sysadmin is the "walk with the Gods" user in LAMS and it has the following privileges:
Has access to System Admin module to set up, modify, archive, hide course/classes/users
Adds/Modify tools properties and settings
Has all access (write/read/delete/modify) to all Content Folders
Can login as any user in the system
Has access to all content folders including users’ private folders.
This means that they can do anything that a course administrator can do plus more.
Course Administrator
The Global Course Administrator:
Has access to set up, modify, archive, hide course/classes/users
Course based roles
Course Manager
Author
Monitor
Learner
Roles and privileges matrix according to course structure and content
Role | Course Structure | Content |
Course Manager |
| • Has write/create/delete permissions in course content folder and • any subfolder within it |
Author | No rights |
|
Monitor |
|
|
Learner |
| No rights |
Course Manager
The Course Manager role for a course has the following privileges:
Can add/remove/modify classes within the course
Can create running instances of sequences that are in the course content folder and assign those to a class
Can stop/start lessons
Can monitor the progress of learners
Author
The Author role for a course can do the following:
Create designs
Save designs in the Course content folder
Has writing/create/read access on the content folder
Can delete sequences that he/she has created, but not of others
Has no access to Monitor to run sequences for this course
Monitor
The Monitor role for a course can do:
Can creating lessons that are in the course content folder and assign those to a class
Can stop/start lessons
Can monitor the progress of learners
Learner
The learner role for a course allows:
Participate sequences
Can access gradebook (when option for course is available)
Now that we know course and roles, let’s look at creation of courses, properties, users and their roles within courses.
Creating Courses in LAMS
Creating courses is only allowed for users with global system roles like sysadmin and course admin.
Creation an individual Course
Login as a system or course administrator role. Then on the user’s drop-down menu (top left), select the Course Manager option
In the course management page, select “Create course”
Now you can add the following details
Course name: name to be given to the course Course code: code to be assigned to the course. Description Status (see course statuses) Set course properties accordingly (see course properties)
After saving the course will be created and you will be returned to Course Management page
Creating subcourses
As explained before, courses can have subcourses to better organise learning for the students. Subcourses are a convenient way to organise groups within the course.
To create a subcourse, in Course Management, select the course under you wish to create a subcourse. This page will show you general information about the course selected.
Once you have selected the course, press the “Create subcourse” button.
Introduce the subcourse name, code (if needed), its description (optional) and set the subcourse status. Similarly to courses, subcourses also have properties. However, the properties for subcourses are only two:
Enable Live Edit and Enable Kumalive (see course properties for details).
Click on save to create the subcourse and you will return to the course details page where you can now see that the subcourse has been created accordingly.
Edit a course/subcourse
In the Manage courses menu, select the course name for the course to edit:
Once the course is selected, it’s details and settings will be displayed:
Press the “Edit” button
And change the settings accordingly.
Creating courses/subcourses in bulk
While creating a course manually is fairly easy, if one has to create hundreds of courses at the beginning of a semester, the task can be very time consuming.
Courses can be created in bulk by using a template spreadsheet file that is provided.
To do so, navigate to the sysadmin menu, then in the “User and course configuration” section, select the option “Import courses”.
In the import courses page, you are able to download the spreadsheet template.
Use the spreadsheet template to create the courses, subcourses and their respective attributes and properties:
In the example in the screenshot, a course called 'Computing Department' will be created, which has 2 subcourses, 'Intro to Computing' and 'Database Systems'. A second course 'Maths Faculty' will also be created with 1 subcourse, 'Discrete Mathematics'.
Note that when intending to create a new course, make sure the row above doesn't contain another entry - otherwise it will be created as a subcourse.
Here is a description of each of the columns:
Name (Mandatory), the name of the group/subgroup. Limited to 255 characters. Code (Optional), code name of the group of course, e.g. COMP1011 Description, description of the group or subgroup. Admin add new users, boolean value, use '1' or 'true'. Defaults to false. Admin browse al users, boolean value, use '1' or 'true'. Defaults to false. Admin change status, boolean value, use '1' or 'true'. Defaults to false.
Course Management when LAMS is integrated with an LMS
If you use LAMS integrated with an LMS, regardless whether the integration is via IMS LTI or a custom integration, course management and student enrolment is taken care of by the integration.
In an integration scenario, LAMS becomes a “slave” for all course management and user enrolment purposes, greatly reducing the workload related to course creation, enrolments, user updates and synchronisation.
If you do have an LMS, we strongly suggest using LAMS as a tool within it using the integration modalities described above. See LAMS integrations for further details.
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