We’ve been provided with a handy video tutorial for first-time instructors who would like a visual walkthrough of the software.
Table of Contents
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You do not need to be on the VPN
You cannot upload existing PDFs/Word documents to the software (though you can copy/paste from them)
The best browser to use is Google Chrome, Chromium, or Edge – Firefox has some issues rendering the buttons on the content editing tools
Students can’t see your outline until you hit publish
You’ll need to provide students with a link to Students can log in to https://outline.uwaterloo.ca, or a direct link to your course outline (once published) for them to access the document. to browse all published course outlines. Their homepage will automatically include all outlines for their registered courses.
Upon publishing your outline you will also be provided a shareable URL (eg: https://outline.uwaterloo.ca/view/xxxx) to access your course outline directly.
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Please Note Until QUEST has fully registered you as the instructor of a course, you won’t be able to attach those courses to your outline. It’s recommended that instructors wait for QUEST to be populated with instructors before getting started with Outline. If you’re interested in starting early for the next term before QUEST is fully populated, check out this FAQ item for some tips! |
The Instructor Dashboard
Upon logging in to https://outline.uwaterloo.ca, most instructors will see the following page:
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If you don’t see this page upon logging in, you might not be registering as an instructor! Check out the troubleshooting page for quick tips. |
The selected term to search for courses. If you’re writing an outline for next term, you may need to change this! You can use the dropdown or arrow buttons to quickly switch terms.
Search Bar. Clicking this you can manually search for specific courses or subjects. Most instructors won’t need to use this.
Course Search results. By default, this list will show one entry for each section you are registered as an instructor for in QUEST. Note that we can’t determine if you’re the instructor of a course until QUEST has that information!
Outline Indicator. This shows if a given section already has an outline, and whether or not it has been published yet.
Add to Outline Button. This is the important one! Click this to add a section to your outline. Once you’ve added all the necessary sections you can start editing
Quick Links. If you need to add sections of a course that you’re not the instructor for (for instance, if section 002 is taught by someone else, but both will share an outline) these links will quickly search for all sections of a given course
Create Draft. A draft is a course outline without any courses – if you want to get started on an outline but QUEST hasn’t registered you as an instructor yet, you can make a draft and add courses to it later. Check out the drafts documentation for help there!
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If it’s your first time editing a course outline in the software and your course outline is for a single section, our recommendation is to give the software a shot without reading the guide, and pick the guide back up if you get stuck! |
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In order to ensure all your information can be properly articulated, we have made it possible to have multiple tables (eg. for multiple marking schemes), as well as added a rich-text input box beneath the tabled sections for more information.
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Mandatory & Recommended Text
Some text content will automatically be added attached to your outline based on which courses are present in and not be editable. These will generally be found at the bottom of the course outline . At this time () the required text from the secretariat will be added, as well as any text your faculty or department has configured if they have done so.in the Policy sections. Examples of this are:
The required outline content as dictated by the University
Any departmental or faculty controlled mandatory content
In other places we provide faculties and departments the ability to create Recommended or Optional texts that you can add via a single click. When these are available, they’ll appear to the right if the text editing box. Simply click on one of these to paste the content into the relevant box. You’re free to edit the text once it’s been added.
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Once added, the blocks are just normal text, they won’t be automatically updated term-over-term! Please check the contents when copying content from previous terms! |
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Saving and Publishing your Course Outline
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Any subsequent changes / saves will be tracked in a revision history (visible to students)
Once the term is over the outline will be permanently locked and no longer editable
Any logged-in UW user will be able to search for can now find and view your course outline (not just your students!)
Any mandatory content (policy stuff) gets locked and will no longer automatically get updates
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If the section in question falls within the same faculty, reach out to your undergraduate office, likely an administrator can add the section for you
If you don’t have a local administrator or the course is in a different faculty, the best option is to add the other instructor as an editor for the outline (see Info/Settings page below) and have them add the section.
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Re-use Existing Course Outlines
One of the great benefits of the software is the ability to quickly import previous course outlines!
Using the Re-use Existing Outline tool at the top of the edit page, you can search for any published course outline, or any unpublished course outline for courses you previously taught. Once selected you can import this content to quickly get ready for the next term!
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Certain data, like the class schedule, calendar description, and mandatory text will not get imported, as these things are automatically configured, but editable content will be pulled in.
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Course outlines fall under the Policy 76 73 (section 6b) as intellectual property of the University of Waterloo, so all instructors are able to freely re-use course outlines or formatting from existing documents within the software. |
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If your faculty has adopted the software officially, you can reach out to your undergraduate office for any support requests, and can always contact the developer directly . You can also the support channel at OutlineSupport@uwaterloo.ca if you encounter any bugs or find any part of the process unmanageable.
We rely heavily on user feedback to identify issues with the software, so please reach out with any questions, comments, or issues you encounterif you have feedback or feature requests, you can always contact developer directly.