ARCHIVED: Tips to make Oncourse work for you

This content has been archived, and is no longer maintained by Indiana University. Information here may no longer be accurate, and links may no longer be available or reliable.

Important:

Oncourse is retired. For details, see ARCHIVED: About the Oncourse retirement.

Consider the following recommendations for teaching and learning with Oncourse:

Customize your tabs (across the top of the page) so that your most visited site is the first tab, and sites you don't use are not displayed. See ARCHIVED: Showing, hiding, and ordering sites.
Set your notifications in My Workspace to determine when you receive email notices alerting you that something has happened in any of your sites. See ARCHIVED: Changing notification preferences.
In My Workspace, you can specify any email account to use for communication and notifications in all of your Oncourse sites. See ARCHIVED: Changing your authorized email address.
In Messages, consider using the automatic forwarding feature to send email (to an email address of your choosing) whenever someone sends you a message. You can do this for each of your sites. See ARCHIVED: Viewing and managing messages.
Note: The email address you specify for automatic forwarding in Messages does not have to be the same as the authorized email address you specify in My Workspace (see previous item) for other types of site communication.
Check your privacy status and change it to visible if you want to communicate with other participants in your sites. See ARCHIVED: Changing your privacy status.
Edit your profile to include a picture and contact information (which is useful for classroom collaboration). See ARCHIVED: Updating your profile.
Access your files from anywhere by storing them in My Workspace, which contains 1 GB of storage space. You can customize permissions to make your files publicly viewable, so you can share them with others outside of Oncourse. See ARCHIVED: File storage in Oncourse.
If you're an instructor, you can customize the menubar to include only the tools you need or want students to use. See ARCHIVED: Adding, removing, hiding, or reordering tools.
When you're finished working in Oncourse, be sure to click Logout and then, on the screen that appears, the CAS LOGOUT button. By doing so, you help ensure your Oncourse profile is not accessed by others.
When entering long passages of text in Messages, Forums, or other Oncourse tools, you might want to first compose in Microsoft Word so you have a saved copy of the text. For more, see ARCHIVED: Can I lose my work if Oncourse times out? (If you experience problems with formatting, see ARCHIVED: Pasting from Microsoft Word.)