Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon Portland Community College

Guide: Getting your class ready at the start of each term

This guide will lead you through the steps needed to get your course ready to teach online each term.

  • Who is this for: All Instructors
  • What is required: A D2L course, your CRN, and important syllabus information to share with students

Edit your class details

If you teach a WEB course, make sure you update your class details pages so that students know about any requirements for your course. Make sure you include any proctoring or in-person requirements, any required software, and include a brief intro to the course.

Course availability

Online Learning will send out an email when courses become available. If you are teaching a fully online course and it has not been reviewed yet, your course will not be available to you until it has been reviewed. You’ll need to contact the faculty mentor responsible for your discipline.

Crosslisting your course (optional)

If you teach more than one section, or CRN, of the same course, you have the option to combine them together. Combining sections is referred to as crosslisting, and is a manual task that needs to be done by the Online Learning department. If you’d like to crosslist your courses, fill out a form with your class details. Wait until you get confirmation on the crosslisting before proceeding with the next tasks.

Copy course content from a previous term

Once your new course is available, you can copy content from a previous term. This allows you to quickly prepare your next course using the material from last term.

Adjusting dates

If you’ve copied content from another course, you will need to update date information in your syllabus and as well as access dates for individual content items and activities, like quizzes, discussions, and assignments. If you want to take your first step to becoming a power user, try these instructions for changing all dates using the Manage Dates tool.

Allow registration overrides for a student

If you want to add a student after the first day of the term, you will need to complete an online registration override for the student.

Add incomplete students

If you have a student who needs access to the new term to finish course work for a previously Incomplete course, you can request access for the incomplete student.

Add a welcome message in the Announcements

Greet your incoming students with a welcoming post in the Announcements tool that introduces you to the students and tells students what to do first.