Student Guide to onCourse

How to log in

1. Go to http://oncourse.wheatoncollege.edu/ You will also find links to onCourse in Quicklinks and on inside Wheaton.
2. Click the "Login" link in the top right of the page.
3. Use your network username and password - w-number and e-mail password.

You should now be logged in. If you got a login error, please double-check your password and w-number. If you continue to have problems, please go to Tech Support in the Wallace Library for additional help with resetting your password.

You should see a list of your courses under "My courses" in the center.

How to Find your Courses

If you are enrolled in one or more onCourse courses already, they should appear under "My Courses" in the center of the main page when you log in. If you aren't enrolled and should be, you can talk to your professor. Not all faculty use onCourse and sometimes at the beginning of the semester faculty forget to make the course available for students to access. So talk to your professor first, and if you are enrolled and still do not see the course contact the onCourse support staff - Jeanne Farrell ×3629 or Peter Kirlew ×3927.

During drop/add week you should be enrolled in an onCourse course site with 24 hours after you submit your gray card.

Your profile

Your profile is your identity in onCourse . All Wheaton onCourse users can see it, including your instructors.  You can personalize it with a picture and information about yourself.

To edit your profile

To access your profile, click on your name next to the "Logout" link at the top of the screen, or the profile link in the Administration block.

Then click the "Edit profile" tab.

Several settings that are accessible from your profile can be customized. Some of the more useful ones, accessible by selecting "Show Advanced," are:

• Email format: Emails sent from onCourse can be sent in "Plain text format" or "Pretty HTML format". HTML format will include images and the onCourse color scheme in emails, but messages will be slightly larger in size.
• Email digest type: You may choose to receive all emails from onCourse in one daily message.
• Forum auto-subscribe: If you select the "Yes..." value you will be subscribed to any forum to which you post a message. This means you will receive an email every time someone in your class posts to a forum discussion.
• Forum tracking: If set to "Yes...", unread forum messages will be highlighted so you can easily see which messages are new.

If you would like to include a user icon with your profile use the Browse button next to the "New Picture" field to locate a picture. Please use JPG, PNG, or GIF format and keep the picture small (about 100x100 pixels max with a filesize less than 500 KB). Again, remember that this profile is accessible to all members of the Wheaton College community—your professors and everyone else will be able to see this icon. The same caution is applicable to any personal description you might include.

Navigating your courses in onCourse

There are a number of ways to move around in a course. The example below is from the Library and Information Services site - the short name for this site is LIS.

"Breadcrumbs"-  are a means of navigation back to previous pages in the course.  They are positioned below the course title in the navigation bar and show where you are in the course.

onCourse - clicking on this link would take you to the Wheaton onCourse homepage.

LIS - is the short name for this course and clicking on this will take you to the homepage of the course.

Resourses - Clicking on this would display a list of all the resources in this course.

Organization and Personnel Information is the name of the resource currently being viewed.

This is only one example of how the breadcrumb menu may appear. It will be different in each course as you navigate through the site.

Jump to is another tool for viewing your courses. Often a course may have many topic areas and the page gets lengthy. It can be tedious having to scroll down the page looking for an assignment. You can collapse all of the topics but the one you need by clicking on the square box to the right of the topic heading.

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Below is an example of the topics collapsed and the "jump to" drop down menu that allows you to navigate to another topic area.

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You can restore the full view of all topics, by clicking on the square box with the + sign to the right of the current topic.

Course Menu

Some courses may use the course menu block. This is another way of navigating the multiple topic or weekly areas. Not unlike the Jump to feature, when you click on one of the menu items only that topic area will display. The image on the right shows the first topic area, Written assignments, expanded to show more detail of the files and resources included in that topic.

Finally, it is possible to navigate between pages by using the arrow buttons on your web browser. We do not recommend this method of navigating. You will have more consistent results by using the navigation options in onCourse.

Forums

If your professor has put a forum in your course, the link on the main page will look like this:

To post a new thread in a forum

1. Click the forum's link then click the "Add a new discussion topic" button at the top of the list of threads.
2. Give the thread a title in the Subject heading.
3. Type your post in the Message section.
4. Check your post for errors then click the "Post to forum" button at the bottom. You will have 30 minutes to edit your post after posting.

Be sure to change the Subscription setting to reflect your preference—if you want to receive emails of every post to the forum, set it to "Send me email copies of posts to this forum." If not, set it to "I don't want email copies of posts to this forum." Some faculty may have set their forums to force you to be subscribed or to not allow you to be subscribed, in which cases this option will not appear.

 

To reply to a thread

Click on the name of the thread in the forum, and click the "Reply" link at the bottom right of the post to which you want to reply. The fields are the same as they are for making a new thread.

You can change whether you're subscribed to a given forum at any time by clicking on the name of the forum, then clicking the "Subscribe/Unsubscribe me from this forum" link in the top right of the window (under the Wheaton onCourse logo bar).

Some faculty may use groups. If you want to see the forum posts for a particular group, select the group name from the drop-down menu that will appear on the forum's page. Depending on how your professor has configured the forum, you may be able to see only those posts made by members of your group(s).

Need more help?

If you want to know anything more about onCourse, try looking it up on http://www.moodle.org/. For additional help, contact Jeanne Farrell ×3629 or jfarrell@wheatoncollege.edu or Peter Kirlew ×3927 or kirlew_peter@wheatoncollege.edu

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