Getting Started with Outline.uwaterloo.ca

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

Notes Before Starting

• 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

• Students can log in to https://outline.uwaterloo.ca 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.

The Instructor Dashboard

Upon logging in to https://outline.uwaterloo.ca, most instructors will see the following page:

Open

1. 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.

2. Search Bar. Clicking this you can manually search for specific courses or subjects. Most instructors won’t need to use this.

3. 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!

4. Outline Indicator. This shows if a given section already has an outline, and whether or not it has been published yet.

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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!

Creating a Course Outline

To create a course outline, simply select the sections you wish to add to your document, and press the Create & Edit Now button.

Open

You should be taken immediately to the course outline editor, where the real fun begins!

Editing a Course Outline

Editing most course outlines should be a fairly straightforward ordeal. The software will provide users with a template that has several editable areas wherein editors can enter rich content with links, headers, tables, etc.

Before you start, take a look at the layout of the document and see which areas need to be filled out and which headers are hard-coded into the template.

At the time of writing (Oct 15, 2021) the template is roughly as follows:

Title

Class Schedule (automatically populate from QUEST)

[Editable] Instructor / TA Information

[Editable] Course Description (includes calendar course description from QUEST)

[Formatted Table] Learning Outcomes

[Editable] Tentative Course Schedule

[Formatted Table + Editable] Texts / Materials

[Formatted Table + Editable] Student Assessment

[Editable (plaintext)] Assignment Screening

[Editable] Notice of Recording

[Editable] Administrative Policy

+ Some mandatory policy attached to the bottom

Most editable chunks of the outline are rich text, but some of them come as formatted tables. There’s some little blurbs of help-text throughout the document to help recommend which content best fits where!

Formatted Table Input

We require certain portions of the course outline to be input as tables. This has several benefits, but a very notable one is that it makes it possible to easily query the data in course outlines for analysis during program reviews.

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.

Mandatory & Recommended Text

Some content will automatically be attached to your outline and not be editable. These will generally be found at the bottom of the course outline 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.

Saving and Publishing your Course Outline

It is recommended that you save your course outline soon after you create it! Saving the course outline the first time commits it to the database, and ensures you can come back and edit it later.

Saving for the first time will also enable the Info/Settings page for your course outline, where you can set additional editors and see some useful course information, such as a useful heatmap of when your students are in other courses.

You can save as often as you want and won’t get any errors for missing content until you decide to Publish.

Publishing

Publishing your course outline is one of the final steps! When you’re confident that you have the majority of the required course outline filled out and are ready to share it with your students, hit the Publish button instead of the normal save button. Read the warning that comes up before continuing as there are some special things that happen to published course outlines!

• 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 can now find and view your course outline

• Any mandatory content (policy stuff) gets locked and will no longer automatically get updates

Upon publishing, if you’ve left anything blank that is required you’ll see a popup with that information, and need to fix any issues before continuing.

Once published you will be presented with a URL that you can share with your students, available on the Info/Settings page. See our sharing guide for help on how to get your students access to your course outlines.

Adding / Removing Courses

If you’re working on a draft, or for some other reason didn’t add a necessary section to your course outline, you can do so by using the Courses / Sections Included tool at the top of the outline editing page. Using this tool you can quickly search through any courses you have access to and attach them to the current document.

By default, editors are able to add the following courses to their outlines:

• Any section the editor is registered as an instructor for in QUEST

• Any other section of a course which the editor is teaching at least one section of

  • For example, if the editor is teaching MATH1 section 001, they can also add MATH1 section 002 even if they aren’t teaching it. This is intended to make it simple for course coordinators to set up course outlines that span several sections

• Any courses in a domain the editor is an administrator for (as configured in the outline administration tools)

Adding Sections You Don’t Have Permissions For

If you need to add a section you do not have permissions for to a course outline, you have a couple options.

• 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.

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!

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.

We hope this functionality is able to help first-time instructors get their bearings by having easy access to previously published course outlines!

Info/Settings Page

Once you’ve saved your course outline once, the Info/Settings page becomes available. Here you can see the current status of the course outline, who can edit it, as well as a very handy heatmap of when your students are busy in other classes.

On this page you will also find the URL to your outline (once published) and help for getting your published course outline into LEARN

Add Additional Editors

If you need other people to assist in editing a course outline, you can grant them permissions to do so here.

By default, only the person who created the course outline will have edit access to the document, so other registered instructors will need to be granted permission explicitly to grant them edit permissions.

Support

Hopefully this guide has provided enough depth for most instructors to get started publishing their course outlines.

If your faculty has adopted the software officially, you can reach out to your undergraduate office for any support requests. 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 if you have feedback or feature requests, you can always contact developer directly.