Your course on OpenLearning is customisable in several ways, some ways you may not even realize. Apart from your course content and activities, there are a range of features (specifically navigation tabs) you can use to help create an engaged and lively community.

Here are some ways you can maximize course engagement and interaction through something as simple as navigation tabs! 

Course Feed

This page acts like a live feed of comment activity taking place in the course. As a facilitator you can use the Course feed to quickly catch up on all activity. Learners can use it to see what their peers are liking, sharing, commenting on or what has caught everyone’s attention.

How to Use: You don’t really need to do anything to set it up. The feed works by default. However, you can add widgets and edit the page to your liking by clicking "Edit" on the top of the page.

Learn more about course feed

Groups

This space allows you to create groups among your course community for group projects and submissions. You can even let your learners create and facilitate their own study groups according to their own interests.

How to Use: Click on Create New Group on the Groups page. Give the new group a title and description. Make it open for everyone or restrict joining. You can add learners to these group and assign them different tasks or projects. Go creative and give these groups cool team names! 

Learn more about groups

Gallery

The Gallery is exactly what it sounds like. It is a space your learners can use to display their work. Here is an example of what a course's gallery looks like:

Learner submissions of their final graphic design projects are displayed for course-mates to see, admire, like, and comment on.

It is worth noting that learner cannot view others’ submissions in the Gallery before they’ve submitted themselves unless set up otherwise.

How to Use: Try setting up a Submission activity in your course. It can be Submit a Picture or a Page activity with Sharing settings that allow learners to view each others’ submissions. All such submissions are directly displayed in the Gallery. 

Getting Creative With the Course Navigation Tabs

While your course comes equipped with default tabs, all your tabs are fully customizable! 

All of the above-mentioned tabs are optional and can be modified. Here is an example of customised and re-arranged left-hand tabs:

1. You can give a different name to a default tab.
   Don’t want to call it the Gallery? Call it the Final Activity Showdown, or anything else you like!
   Videos & Activities not exactly what you want? Call it Course Content, or Stuff That Matters Most – The choice is yours!
    
2. You can add more tabs for other purposes too. Create an easily accessible page with information about other courses that you or your institution have created. Or, create a Q & A Forum where learners can discuss any issues they have while doing the course. You can get creative and come up with tabs that may encourage positive or creative thinking. Or, possibly create tab as a type of depositary bank for learners to share interesting things from their daily encounters.  

How to use: To change your navigation tab appearance or even to re-arrange the left-hand navigation tabs, go to Course Setup > Appearance > Course Navigation.

The navigation tabs on the left hand are pretty flexible, so don’t be scared to get inspired! Use them to create multiple spaces to spice things up and break the sameness in your course. Diversity is good - it will help promote different threads of discussions, more opportunity for interaction, and lead to better bonds in your course community.

Learn more about editing course navigation