1. Overview

This guide will show you how easy it is to get started hosting your own courses into the Trivantis CourseMill LMS. Please refer to the administrator and instructor guides for more detailed information not mentioned in this document.

2. Administrator

The first step is to set up your organization and add courses. This needs to be done through the administrator toolbar. The administrator access to CourseMill is located on a separate page from the normal login screen for security.

The Administrator toolbar allows you to:

. Add additional data fields to track student data (sub orgs)

. Import/add/modify/remove courses

. Group courses together into curriculums

. Create/modify/remove students, instructors, reporters, and guests

. Register/unregister students into courses

. Administrate bulletin boards, course documents, and internal mail

. Run/download reports on student progress

. Add custom reports to the reports menu

.The first step is to login. Go to www.coursemill.com/administrator_login.jsp and log in with the provided login name and password.

CourseMill supports the creation and administration of an unlimited number of organizations.

.After logging in, you will have full access to your organization. Normally, you will need to set up your organization by clicking the Manage Orgs’ tab. Since, however, an organization has already been set up for you in the trial account, the next step is to add an instructor.
Click on the ‘Manage Users’ tab from the organization home page. Next, click on the ‘Add User’ button located in the left hand pane.
 

From here you may add any number of instructors and students to the organization. Be sure to check the instructor box in order to set up a specific user as an instructor. Go ahead and also create a student as well.

.Now that there is at least one instructor, courses may be added. You can access the course menu by clicking on the ‘Manage Curriculums’ tab at the top of the page and then click on the “Course List” button from the left panel.

If any courses already exist they will be listed here. Clicking on the ‘Add course’ button underneath the ‘Course List’ on the left hand pane will take you to the course creation menu. From here you can set the courseID, course name, any description or notes students will see, whether students can register themselves in to the course, who will be instructing the course, and also set the size of window the course will be displayed in. You can also
specify whether you will allow instant messaging, discussion boards, chat, or email support. Do not worry about the Course Local Dir and Course http Dir these are already configured for you.

.After the course has been added into the system, the next task is to import the actual course pages and content. CourseMill 5.0 is SCORM 1.2 and AICC conformant and can also handle Disconnected SCORM and non-SCORM courses.

.Click on the ‘Import Content’ tab located on the left hand pane. From here you can import SOCRM or AICC content packages and import specific content items. A SCORM or AICC package is just a zip file with all of the course files inside of it, where the imsmanifest.xml file is at the root. You can also choose to import content from a server.

NOTE: Web browsers are restricted to only uploading course packages no larger than 40MB in size. If your course is larger, you must set up an FTP server on the CourseMill site and FTP the file. Then use the ‘local course import’ utility to select the file from the server.

.Once your course is upload successfully, you will need to register some students into the course. Click on the ‘Manage Users’ button to add a student to the course. This works the same as the steps followed above when you added an instructor and a student.

Congratulations! You now have a working course! You may log in as the student and check it out.

Other things to try out:

You can select ‘Edit Organization’ from the ‘Manage Orgs’ tab. From here you can change its name, turn on/off email, instant messaging, file posting, and chat features for all courses, and add sub org values. Sub org values allow you to track more data fields for the users. You might add a new field called “SSN” so now all students will have a social security number associated with them. You can also add select values to these fields. You might have another sub org called “Location” and then have the values “North, South, East, West” so now only those values can be selected for the field.

You may now go to the CourseMill homepage: www.coursemill.com to access the student and instructor logins.

2. Student

As a student you will be taken to your course list. You may go into any course and see your progress and launch the course. You may also view your course calendar by clicking the ‘My Calendar’ button in the left hand pane of your Home screen. This will list the dates of any registered courses of recurring courses that you are enrolled in. To launch a course from this Home screen you may click on the blue button located to the left of the course name.
This will automatically launch the first incomplete part of the course. As another option, you may click on the green button next to the course name and you will be taken to a course information screen that shows you your status, scores, and prerequisites. From this screen, you may also launch a course by click on the blue button next to your course name. Once in this ‘Courses’ section you can also view and send course documents (if enabled by instructor) by clicking on the ‘Documents’ or ‘Send Documents’ button in the left hand pane.

If courses are listed in your organization that you are not yet enrolled for, you may enroll in them by simply clicking ‘Course Catalog’ button located in the left hand pane under your Home screen. You then must click the ‘Enroll’ button located in the details window to that specific course (if self enroll option is enabled by admin) and you will be automatically enrolled (unless course is full).

You can also click on the ‘Community’ tab and use chat, instant messenger, email, and file sending (if enabled for the course.)

3. Instructor

The Instructor toolbar allows you to:

. View/Edit/modify/upload the course

. Post document files and assignments for students to download

. Send email messages to students and receive homework assignments

. Create/modify/remove students, instructors, and guests

. Register/unregister students into courses

. Conduct online chats with students or answer questions over the instant messenger

. Moderate and post messages into the course bulletin board

. Run/download reports on student progress

A great feature about the instructor is that you can register students by sub org values.
From here you could register all students from a certain district or perhaps by job title.

Check out the reports menu and see how the students are doing. These reports may also be downloaded as a ‘CSV’ file which can be opened in applications such as Excel for more powerful management.

4. Importing from Lectora

If you have Lectora 2003 SP4a or higher, courses can be published right into CourseMill!

.The first step is to configure Lectora to know where CourseMill is located. Click on the ‘file’ menu and select ‘preferences.’ Then click on the CourseMill tab. Make sure the host address is www.coursemill.com and the path is simply /

.When you are ready to publish, select “Publish to CourseMill” from the publish menu. Fill in the same CourseID you used in CourseMill, along with the instructor’s ID and password. You may also set up any of the SCORM options as well.

.Click ‘publish’ and that’s it. Lectora will upload the SCORM package directly into CourseMill where it will automatically be imported.

12/04/07

CourseMill Quick Start Guide