Frequently Asked Question

In order to help students quickly adapt to each new online course, we strongly encourage using this format across campus. This new tab format is great for mobile devices and is a cleaner way to organize material.

Onetopic is now the default format with topic 0 "As tab." If you want to make section 0 display above the tabs (only recommended when you have a very short amount of content in this section), here's how you can do that:

1. After logging into BeaconLearning, select the course you'd like to change
2. On the left, in the Administration block, click "Edit settings"
3. Scroll down and expand the "Course format" section
4. For "Visualization mode of section 0" select "As tab" or "Before tabs" depending on what you prefer

6. Click "Save and display"

7. Now back in your course, make sure you have editing turned on
8. There is an "Edit" option in the upper right hand corner of each tabbed section. For week 0 click "Edit" > "Edit section"
9. Uncheck the option for "default section name" at the top
10. For this first section, title it "Course Resources"
- In the summary box, type your intro and welcome to the course. Introduce yourself, your location on campus, office hours, etc.

11. For the remaining weeks/topics, click the same "Edit" option from step 8 and repeat step 9. Type the corresponding weeks in for each tap (Ex - Tab 1 = Week 1; Tab 2 = Week 2, etc)

11a. If you are teaching a 16 week course, you may find it easier to type in Monday's date of each week (Ex - Tab 1 = 8/28; Tab 2 = 9/4, etc)

NOTE: One of the reasons I recommend not putting dates in the topic name is that these topic names will come over with a course import. Therefore, you may want to leave the tab/section names more generic.

Alternative Ideas:

• Make one tab for each major assignment or moving part of the class. I put links and resources in the tab, top to bottom, in the order they need them. The top link always says, "Assignment instructions," so they know where the first place to go is if they're confused -- top of the tab.
  

• Group tabs by chapters/topics