Create New Homepage

1. Click on Homepages from the Course Management Console. (Refer to Figure 1.)
2. Click the Create New Homepage button. The screen shown in Figure 2 will appear.
3. Type a name for the new homepage in the Name field (required).
4. Give a little description of the Homepage in the Description field.

Click the Save button. Your new homepage has been created. You will be redirected to the Build Course Homepage area.  See below for instruction on how to build your homepage.

Figure 2

Build Course Homepage

Building a homepage helps you design the structure and placement of your course tools.  In order to simplify, the homepage is divided into 5 sections: Header, Column 1, Column 2, Column 3 and Footer. These five sections are represented by each of the tabs on the Build Homepage screen. The selected tab appears to be highlighted in yellow.  See Figure 3.

1. Choose the  Header tab.
2. Choose from the list of available widgets to be place in the Header.
3. Use the button to move the tools from Available Widgets to Active Widgets.  This will make the tool appear in the Header section of your Course Homepage.
4. Repeat steps 1-3 for each of the tabs. Note: Make sure that you specify the width for Column 3 and click the icon to make it appear on the screen.  By default the Column 3 width is set to zero, so tools added to this area will not appear unless the width is reset.
5. Click the Preview button to see if your homepage appears like you wanted.
6. Once you are  done with all 5 tabs, click the Save button.

Choose OK on the alert window to confirm the saving of your course homepage.

Figure 3

Activate Homepage

Although you have created a new homepage, it will not appear on the course homepage until you have activated it. To do so, follow the steps listed below:

1. After your have created and built a home page, click the Manage Homepages link located on the top left corner of the Build Homepage screen.  See Figure 3.  You will be taken to the page shown in Figure 4.
2. Click the X mark in the Active column in the row corresponding to the Homepage you want to make active. A check mark appears indicating that Course Homepage is active.  Note: Once the Course Homepage is made active, you cannot change back to inactive until you have created a new course Homepage and activated it.

You can edit or delete a Course Homepage by clicking the Edit or Delete icon corresponding to the Homepage you want to edit or delete.  See the last column in Figure 4.

Figure 4