CourseLab 2.4 Basics – Creating your first Course

Obtaining the software

To begin you need to install and register the software

http://www.courselab.com/

Once installed click the icon

to open the application

Starting a project a. Naming & Saving

b. Choosing a template

1. On the “Start Page” screen, select “Create New Course”

A new Course Wizard will open

2. Click the “Next” button to start creating new Course

3. Insert a new course name and specify the folder where the course files

will be located (if it does not exist, it will be created automatically) and

press “Next”

NOTE: Avoid using the special characters (@, #, $, ^, %, &, *, and quotation marks).

4. Choose a template – there are a lot built in for you to choose from to get you

started. Later you can experiment with different ones to see what suits you best – you

can also create and add your own…

5. Click “Next”

You will get a success screen – click “finish”

You will now see that your course has been created

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Three Views…

This is a basic thing that can at first be confusing to people. What you have created is a

course with a single module called ‘Take Off’. At the moment you are looking at the

‘Normal’ or what I like to call slide view. But there are two other views of the module

to consider a) Title View b) Master View

Clicking on the icons will take you through each view

The Title View

The Title View is really the Title Page that you can edit and is really separate from your

slides – it has limited functionality!

The Master View - is best described as a template for your slides. For example if

you place an image in it, it will be present on all of your slides

Here I have place a bit of clipart of the shuttle it will show on every new slide I create

as a background image

Adding Images and text

Lets start by adding a logo and text to the Title Page

Adding images is very easy you can

a) Copy and paste from almost anywhere e.g. from a browser or from a word doc

etc.

b) Use the Insert Menu

c) From the toolbar icons

Editing Text

As a text box has already been inserted you can just double click it to edit the text

It will appear much like any other editor for text

To add another text box you can a)click on the text box icon

b) Insert Text from the tool bar

Text boxes by default appear in the middle of your screen with the words Enter Text –

they are sometimes hard to see – again double click to edit the contents – then you

can drag it to where you want it on the screen

c) Copy and paste from another document – be aware though that sometimes

copy and pasting from other documents will also copy that documents

formatting and may look different than expected. For example I would

normally copy something from Word or PDF and paste it into ‘Notepad’ first to

remove most of the formatting so that I just get plain text then copy and paste

into courselab.

Add Images to the Master View

1. Select the Master View

2. Then Insert > Picture> from file

3. Navigate to the images folder on the Courselab Training>Basics>Images and select

Image7.gif

Resize it by selecting it and dragging it to resize then drag it to the corner

We’ll also place the Nasa Logo in place of the text box you can see – select the text

box and delete it!

Then go through the same process as above to insert the Nasa logo

Navigate to the images folder on the Courselab Training>Basics>Images and select

nasa-logo-1975.png

Your Master View should now look like this

Editing the Normal (Slides View)

Navigate to the Normal View

It will look exactly like the Master view for now until we add something else. Lets

add a Title – Add a Text box and Edit it to say Countdown

Now copy and text some text into the screen – navigate to

\CourselabTraining\Basics\Text\Countdown101.doc

Copy it from the document & Paste it straight into the slide – if you are lucky it will not

need to be reformatted. However you will need to resize the box to see all the text

Name your slides – It is important to name your slides as the navigation is created

automatically based on the slides name. To do this right click on a slide and select

rename

You will not see the result of this until we have viewed our Module.

View Module

At anytime you want to see what you have done as a user would see it select View

Module on the toolbar

It will run the module exactly

as a user would see it!

Add an Object - Lets change the text and add an object from the library

Lets take the T-times and add them to a list which is graphically quite nice.

Select the Object Library and select Lists – then choose ‘Standard Block’ and Drag it

onto the slide.

If you double click it on the slide you can edit it

Change the border colour to Green

Change the Checkmark to Arrow and click Apply

You will see the results of the changes you have made

To Change the contents double click on the ‘Item Text goes here’ and the text editor

will appear – go ahead and type in T-27 Hours

To add another click the + sign and add T-19 Hours and so on

You can then edit the text removing the T-Numbers because they now appear in a list.

You will also want to cut the next paragraph and re-past it into its own text box to

move things around on the page

Add a new slide

To add a new slide you can just right click on a slide to add another

Or use the Insert command in the tool bar

Lets create a new slide and rename it Blast Off

This time we will add a some text as we did before but then add a text box to make

the text look more appealing

Tip you can copy text from one slide to another so you could copy ‘Countdown’ from

Slide 1 and paste it into Slide 2 then edit it to say Blast Off

Now navigate to Textboxes from the Object Library and select Relief and drag it onto

the slide. Double click it to edit it…

Change the Border Colour to Green and edit the text by clicking on ‘TE’ the text editor

will appear. Type in “Watch the movie below to see Blast Off”

How to insert a movie

Navigate to Media in the Object Selection list and select ‘Flash Video’ as we are going

to insert a .flv file and drag it onto the slide

Double click the grey square to edit the Object

Select File and navigate to the ‘Movies’ Folder

Select > Space Shuttle Launch (Low).flv

Select Player Control ‘Show’ and make sure that Movie autostart is NOT ticked then

click Apply

That’s it – now View Your Module to see what has happened

Lastly lets look at Publishing our Learning Unit

How to Publish

Go to File > Publish Course

Click Next

The Course Identifier and Description are used to identify the Unit of Learning when

placed into a VLE (such as moodle)

Click Next

Each Module within this course will also be identified separately so they need an

Identifier and description our Module (we have only one) is called Take Off

Next we can decide how we would like it published SCORM 1.2 is the best one for

Moodle or you can publish your module to run from a CD

Make your selection and Click next

Choose where you want to save the file on your PC and click next

Click next again then Finish

The course has now been published to where you chose on your PC

If you chose to publish to CD it generates a simple html file called autorun if you

double click it, it will open up in a browser

To start it select the Take Off Module

These are some really basic concepts that you can use to get you started. I

have included some more advanced examples in the Tutorial Examples

Folder. The Manual is pretty good and a much more comprehensive guide

than this simple one – I would suggest referring to it as much as possible.