in the College of Engineering in the College of Engineering
ICON, a course-management system, was made available to the entire campus for the fall 2005 courses. All College of Engineering courses are automatically created in ICON. Until the instructor activates a course, the files and content are not visible, so just because an ICON course site has been created does not mean that you must use ICON. The College encourages using ICON to help administer courses and for FERPA compliance in posting grades.
View
the right
and roles for Instructor-Designer, TA-Designer, TA Levels 1 and 2, and
Course Builder. If the TA is known to OSIRIS, that person is assigned the role
of TA (High Level, L1).
ITS installed version 8.3 as the production version at the end of May 2008. When you login to ICON, you'll be using this new version. One big difference is that the courses you have access to are no longer listed on the ICON home page by semester. The last 10 courses accessed are listed. You can also search for the course site you want to open using the Search For: box.
Changes in the new version include new icons and color schemes and some reorganization of information.
ITS will offer training on the new version of ICON 18 -21 August 2008 as part of the NExTT workshops; training topics and registration. Other ICON training is schedule in September.
Known Issues are available in the ICON quick links section on the ICON login page.
By default, your ICON course created and populated from Registrar information is unavailable to students; that is, they cannot access it even though their names may appear in the Classlist.
To make your course available:
- From the Course Home, click Edit Course in the NavBar.
- Click Course Offering Information.
- Check the IsActive textbox.
- Click Save.
At the end of the semester, you must deactivate the course when you no longer want students to have access to the course site. Making your course unavailable at the end of the term allows you to keep student data without allowing them access. To make the course unavailable (students can no longer access it from their MyHome page), click to remove the checkmark from the IsActive textbox in step 3 above.
see http://icon.uiowa.edu/onlinehelp/setup/course_availability/
By students: Do not put answers and other files on your ICON course site until you are ready for students to have access to those files. You can store files containing sensitive information in an ICON development site or on a network drive, your hard drive, or an engineering class share drive. See Known Issues #36.
By other instructors: Instructors can add other (co-) instructors to their class with the Add Participant link in the Self-Registration course admin tool; set the rights of the person added to Instructor-Designer. Note that an Instructor-Designer will be in your classlist and grades.
If you do not want other co-instructors to show up in the classlist or grades, ask Diana Harris, 335-5121, to add an individual as Support Staff, who can see course information but not change it.
By default, ICON labels course content as "Unit1, Unit2,...". You can change the enumeration to be A, B, C, or I, II, III. Additionally you can replace or remove the word "Unit".
- Click Content in the NavBar.
- Click Settings.
- Click Enumerations.
- For each level of enumeration, from the drop down lists select the desired style of Arabic or Roman numerals or letters, or select no enumeration.
- Click Save when done. Click View Content to see your changes.
The default action for course creation is to create one ICON course site per section. If you want courses merged into a single ICON course site, please tell Diana Harris, 335-5121.
You cannot upload .exe files and other file types such as .shtml, .ini, .dll, to an ICON course. Make any such files a .zip file(s) and then upload. Use WinZIP or WinRAR (Windows) or GZip (Linux) for that task. See Acceptable File Types.
You can create a course as a development site and copy content to a live course at the appropriate time. You can also copy content from an existing ICON course to another ICON course.
You can use email to send a message to individuals, groups, or sections. See the ICON help for more information and known issues.
During the semester, the running grade formula incorrectly calculates a student's grade when using weighted grading, but correctly calculates the final grade when all grade items are included. To correctly calculate grades in courses where weighted grading is used, divide the points accumulated by the points available.
There are two roles possible for an individual who is not enrolled in a course but to whom you want to give access to an ICON course site: Guest Student and Preview User.
The Guest Student role is exactly the same as the student role, with one exception: since guest IDs are not governed by the Hawk ID system, they have a local password, and therefore need a way to change their passwords locally. Therefore, Guest Student has the password change tool turned on, where as normal users don't. The only time that role needs to be used is when you create a guest ID, used when the person does not have a Hawk ID. When you use the Create New User option, it automatically generates an ID in the guest format, which is g#_name.
The Preview role allows anyone with web access to enter your course and view your content-type materials, including content files, news, and announcements. Preview users cannot, however, view quizzes, discussions, or other interactive areas.
For information on enrolling either type, read about adding participants.
The ICON homepage consists of widgets that you can customize or remove. Read the Homepage Widgets help for how to modify your course homepage.
The Navigation Bar (NavBar) is the top strip of the course pages, containing the course name and various links. It remains visible throughout the course site. To edit the NavBar, click the tiny Edit NavBar icon in the upper left corner; the blue arrow points to that icon in this illustration.
The College of Engineering has its own template that can be selected from the Template pull down menu at the top of the Edit Navigation Bar page.
When you role switch to the .student view, what you see is mostly what a course student sees. You cannot take surveys or quizzes, but the course content view is accurate. See the on-line help for more information.
Changing the start and end date (from Edit Course | Course Offering Information ) has no effect on Registrar-related courses. The only thing that affects visibility to students is the IsActive box.
There is an abundance of on-line help with ICON. From the ICON home page, there are links to an ICON FAQ, on-line help, help for students, known issues, and use statistics. On-line help covers how to get started using ICON, how to move files from another ICON course site, and each of the components of ICON, such as calendar, content, class list, discussion, gradebook, and quizzes.
Within the college, you can get help from Diana Harris, 335-5121, or Sarah Williams, 335-5753.
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