About

CourseWare is a free course management solution with a hint of social networking built in.  It was created in response to the need for a course management system that does not put arbitrary restrictions on what you can and can’t do with your data.  When your course is hosted on CourseWare, you retain complete control over your content's visibility and availability.  You can make content available to only yourself or to anyone in the world!  CourseWare is unique in that each piece of content (for example, a lecture or an assignment) has it's own visibility level, so you can make as much or as little of your course as visible as you see fit.  Finally, if you ever decide at any time and for any reason that CourseWare is not the right fit for you or your course, we will provide you with a zip archive of all your course content that you can use to jump-start your preferred course hosting solution.

 

Features

Following is a detailed list of the features CourseWare provides.

 

Fine-grained visibility controls

CourseWare is the only course management system we know of that gives you a full range of visibility controls for your content on an item-by-item basis.  Want to make most of your content public but have a course reading with copyright restrictions?  No problem, just make that file visible to members only!

Question + answer discussion forum

Stop answering the same questions over and over via email -- use our integrated discussion forum to save time and energy by answering student questions in the open, without resorting to a third-party solution.  Supports collaborative tagging, view counts, read/unread, and anonymous questions.

 

Dynamic homepage

The course homepage automatically updates with the most relevant course info as the quarter progresses.

 

Announcements

Post announcements to the course that show up on the course homepage. Made a typo? Announcements can be edited after you post them!

Assignments

Upload assignment requirements, set deadlines, and grade submissions.  Upcoming assignment deadlines will automatically show up on the course homepage.

 

Lectures

Schedule days, insert descriptions, and link to handouts. Lectures are automatically synced to the course calendar and upcoming lectures show up on the course homepage.

 

Videos

Easily upload video recordings, and attach video segments to your lectures. Courseware video features standard resolution and HD resolution with pan/zoom functionality. You can also attach questions to your video, and they will show up in front of the video at the proper time.

 

In-video questions

You can create many types of questions using our question authoring tools, and insert them into your videos at specified times. These questions will pop-up in front of the video at the proper time. You can then view statistics of your student's responses to questions.

 

Custom pages

Have content that doesn’t “fit” anywhere else?  Create your own pages using the rich text editor, and have them added to the course menu. Supports basic formatting, tables, and image-embedding.  Also, if you give them permission to do so, students can create sub-pages or collaborate on these pages wiki-style.

 

Office hours

Schedule office hours so your students know how and when they can get in touch with you or your staff for some personal Q/A time.  Upcoming office hours are displayed on the course homepage.

 

Sections (Subgroups)

Manage discussion group or lab membership for large courses.  You can limit capacity, assign TAs, and schedule meeting times.

Upload Files

Upload handouts, images, or any other kinds of files to a dedicated course files area.

 

Calendar

You or your students can export the course calendar (lectures, office hours, deadlines, etc.) to ical format for use in an ical-compatible application such as Google Calendar.

 

Roles/privileges

You can give members of your course different roles and configure their privileges as you see fit.  Also, you can tweak content visibility on an item-by-item basis.

 

Online Quizzes

Create and administer quizzes online.  Quiz questions can be multi-answer or single-answer and are automatically graded based on how many points each question is worth.

 

Blogging/micro-blogging

CourseWare is built on top of an open source social networking platform, so blogs and twitter-style conversations fit in naturally.

Notifications

Any time new content such as an announcement or lecture is added to the course, those who choose can be notified via email.

Course Cloning

Copy course content from one term to the next so that you don’t have to start completely from scratch when the new term arrives.  Content from past offerings of your courses is saved and archived.

 

Interested?  

Contact the CourseWare team today by using the Feedback button in the bottom right corner of the page or by sending email to courseware-support at cs.