FanshaweOnline Setup

The Educational Support Technologist (EST) assigned to your School or Campus will create your FOL course, enroll you as its professor, link your section to student registration, and set up any standard components or materials for you, including:

• The course outline and plan
• Links to College policies, student services, resources, and software and technical support
• School-specific home page components or content (where applicable)
• Materials from a previous or “master” offering of the course (if your School makes these available. This may be done automatically, or it may be something you need to request from your EST.)

You can work through the remainder of this section to finish setting up your FOL course. Resources to help you with this task will be included as part of each step as well as at the end of this page, but remember that your School or Campus’ EST can provide you with one-on-one technical support with any of these topics. 
 

There are several key features of the FOL Homepage that you should be familiar with:
 

1. Navigation Buttons – These links allow you to quickly access your course, update your profile and settings, and receive the following types of alerts:
   • Message Alerts – Notifies you when you have new e-mails or messages in FOL. Click here to access your @fanshaweonline.ca e-mail account. 
   • Subscription Alerts – Notifies you with a summary of activity for the courses you have subscribed to.
   • Update Alerts – Notifies you when there are new system-wide or course-specific announcements.
2. Resources – These links connect you with additional services that can support your teaching, including Accessibility Services and Copyright Services. 
3. Announcements – This section includes system-wide announcements such as notification of upcoming FOL system maintenance or academic deadlines.
4. User Links – This section allows you to create your own personal “quick links” to navigate to regularly accessed external websites.
5. Tasks – This section allows you to create your own personal calendar items that you do not want to be reflected in a course calendar. These items are personal and not seen by other users.
6. Courses – This section includes the courses you have access to, including the courses you are delivering, courses you are viewing, and program homerooms for the programs your courses are part of. This is the area of focus for the next section.

For additional support with this topic, review the FOL Help Documentation around Getting Started, or view the video guide for FOL Essentials: Login and Basic Navigation.
 

The course homepage is the first screen that students will see when they access a course in FOL. You can customize the homepage for your course to highlight the information that will be most important to your students by selecting the widgets you would like to display. These standard system widgets or information tools are typically deployed to every course and should be modified as follows:

• Instructor Information: enter your details in this homepage widget. Include your name, office, office hours if applicable, and your @fanshaweonline.ca e-mail address.
• Announcements: post a welcome message in this widget that provides students with a brief introduction to the course and describes the first things you would like the students to view or do in FOL.
• Calendar: this widget will include any dates that you set in the discussions, quizzes, and submission folder tools. If there are additional key dates or deadlines indicated in your course plan, these should be entered here so that students (and you) can stay on track throughout the semester. The FOL calendar directly shows reminders for upcoming deadlines, and also links to the Brightspace Pulse app that many students use to keep track of upcoming activities and evaluations in all of their courses.

FOL Help Documentation: Homepages and Widgets, Announcements, Calendar, Brightspace Pulse

FOL Help Videos: FOL Hacks: Instructor Information Widget, Creating a New Announcement, How to Add an Audio Welcome Announcement
 

Set Communication Expectations
Tell your students what you expect from them (e.g., which tools they will use, if you want them to e-mail you if they are going to miss a class, netiquette for discussion boards) and how you will communicate with them (e.g., which tools you will use, and how quickly you will respond to them). You can share this information with your students in your welcome message, a homepage announcement, or within the course content.

Note: The College standard is to provide responses to student e-mails on a timely basis and suggests that this is no more than three business days. The recommended turnaround time for evaluation is no more than ten business days, as a short “feedback loop” contributes significantly to student success.

Set up Communication Tools
Refer to your course plan to identify the types of communication tools you will need for your course, whether they are synchronous (e.g., virtual classroom/web conferencing) or asynchronous (e.g., e-mail, announcements, discussion boards, and surveys).

If you are delivering online hours synchronously or are using virtual office hours, you will need to set up these sessions before the course begins and post the links prominently so that students can access them easily.

FOL Help Documentation: Zoom, Bongo Virtual Classroom, Discussions, Announcements, E-mail, Discussions

FOL Help Videos: Video - Video - Essential Communication Tools, How to Schedule a Zoom Meeting, Introduction to Zoom Settings, How to Schedule a Bongo Virtual Classroom Session

Use your course plan or lesson plans to help you organize your online course content in a logical and consistent manner to make it easy for your students (and you!) to navigate your FOL course:

• Your course plan shows you the topics and sequencing for the modules and sub-modules in your course. You could have a module for each week, lesson, or unit in your course. The best option is whatever might make the most sense for students and which can be done in a way that is consistent throughout the course.
• Your lesson plans show you what specific content – materials and activities – to include in each module. The delivery method for your course will influence the amount and types of online content you will have. That is to say, a face-to-face course may only contain supplementary or study materials in each week or module, but a fully-online and asynchronous course would need to have all materials and activities available to students in this online space.
• Any content that students should not see in week one should be hidden or restricted to a future start date. You are free to upload these materials as they are ready, but students can be overwhelmed if too much of the course content is available at once.

FOL Help Documentation: Content Interface, Creation, and Management

FOL Help Videos: Add a Module to FOL Content, Upload a File to FOL Content, Create a Weekly Module using a Template in FOL

Help your students plan and manage their own learning by giving them as much information as possible about the graded evaluations they will complete in your course. If this hasn’t been done already as part of your EST’s templating of your course, create entries in FOL Grades for each of the evaluations in the course before the course begins. Ensure that the evaluation types and weights or values on FOL match the evaluation types and weights or values indicated on your course outline and course plan. You will use FOL Grades to track students’ marks throughout the course, and students will be able to check here to see your feedback on assignments and tests, and to keep track of their ongoing progress.

Note: the FOL grade book distinguishes between a grade item’s maximum points ("out of" score) and weight (contribution to overall course grade). You may be able to modify the points for evaluations you create, but the grade book weights are determined by the course outline and must not be changed. 

FOL Help Documentation: Creating, Managing, and Entering Grades

FOL Help Videos: Understanding the Grades Tool, Create a Grade Item, Associate an Activity with a Grade Item