Manage Courseware

Learn how to set up a lecture schedule, review proposals, and publish lectures for student access.

Managing your lesson plan and schedule is straightforward in the Administration section of SYLVA. We'll cover:

  1. Setting up the courseware schedule
  2. Assigning content to the lectures
  3. Accepting proposals and publishing lectures

Set up courseware schedule

We will first go through setting up the structure of our lesson plan before creating the content.

In Administration, go to Courseware. This is where we can set up the lecture schedule.

Add your lecture schedule by clicking Add new lecture.

There are four fields to include for each lecture:

  • Lecture title (required) - Title of the lectures, usually named after the lecture week or lesson topic 
  • Publication Date (required) - When the students can view the lecture in a summary list of all lectures
  • Start Date (required) - When students can open and access the lecture content
  • End Date (optional) - When a lecture is no longer accessible

The dates give you the flexibility to set up all your lectures in advance without revealing all of the material from the beginning of the course.

Add as many lectures as your course schedule requires. I'll quickly add a few lectures.

Lectures are listed as unpublished when the publish dates are set in the future.

Reorder lectures with the arrow icon, and drag the lectures to your desired order.

Revise lecture names and dates with the pencil icon.

Remove lectures with the trash icon.

Assign content to lectures

All lecture content is created in the authoring tool CREO. When we create new courseware, we need to make sure we assign the content to the appropriate Project, which is the course name.

Feel free to customize your courseware as much as possible.

After we are finished creating our lecture, we deploy it to SYLVA by clicking the paper airplane icon on the main toolbar at the top.

A pop-up window will open. Select the relevant lecture from the lecture schedule we previously made to assign the new lecture content. Then click OK.

Accept proposals and publish lectures

After we deploy the lecture, a preview of the lecture is opened in the browser. We call this a proposal so that you can preview the content before confirming the lecture for your course. This is helpful when collaborating with colleagues and to prevent making mistakes in your lectures. You and your colleagues can send unlimited proposals.

At the bottom of the preview, there are options to accept or reject the proposal.

  • If you are unhappy with the proposal because of a mistake or you want the content to be revised, click Reject this proposal.
  • If you are happy with the lecture content, click Accept this proposal.

We can view all of the proposals under the courseware schedule.

  • Red - Rejected
  • Yellow - No action was taken
  • Green - Accepted

It is possible to review, accept, or reject past proposals anytime.

After accepting a proposal, the lecture is published based on the courseware schedule dates. The students will be able to view the lecture listed under Courseware based on the Publish date as long as a proposal has been accepted. The students can only open and download the lecture based on the Start date.

In the below example, the students can see the entire lesson plan since the publish dates have already passed. However the students can only access the latter lectures (i.e., Lecture 2, 3 and so on) on the respective start dates.

Recap

Schedule, create, and maintain the courseware for your courses. We reviewed how to set up your course structure with the courseware schedule, create and assign content to each lecture, and review lecture proposals to publish online.