Naming Conventions
Naming SIMnet content and courses consistently helps instructors and students
After a few semesters of using SIMnet, the amount of content and courses can build up. To find and use your materials efficiently; get accurate and timely support; and avoid that colleague who puts an asterisk in front of everything it is important to name your content with specific, repeated naming conventions.
The important thing is to select a convention and enforce it throughout SIMnet.
Courses and Sections
Course names in SIMnet should include the name of the course as it appears elsewhere at your school. For example, many schools use SIMnet as a part of their Computer Science intro course. Their course name at the registrar's office and in Canvas is CS 101. The SIMnet course name should match.
Section names in SIMnet should describe which section of the course it is, when the course is taking place, who is teaching it, or when the course is meeting. If there are 4 sections in the Spring of 2021 taught by different instructors meeting on different days. Those section names may be
Section 1 Spring 2020 Smith TTr 12:15-1:10
Section 2 Spring 2020 Smith WF 3:15-4:10
Section 3 Spring 2020 Ndebe MW 9:15-10:10
Section 4 Spring 2020 Ndebe F 5:45-7:35
Each semester there is at least one instructor who has a course archived or deleted and cannot tell SIMnet Support what their course is called, which makes recovering their course more difficult and slower than it would otherwise be.
Success: Create a class 'template' and name the section to include 'template' or 'main' to indiicate the the class should only be copied. Remeber to close your template class so students can't enroll into it!
SIMnet Content
SIMnet content is typically used across many courses and will be more context-dependent than course names are. Content may be used by all of the courses at a URL, all the sections of a single course, or for a single instructor.
SIMnet course content should mention the course name and the content covered in the assignment. It should also mention the version of the Office materials covered in the content. For example, simply naming the first quiz for an Access course Access Quiz 1 is hard to use when a school switches from 2016 to 365/2019 content. So the first quiz covering Access would be CS 101 365 Access Quiz 1.
Master Classes
Creating a master course can allow you to copy a course without any of the modifications that individual instructors make to the course. This course should be clearly labelled as a Master course and should not have any students added or any associated grades. Adding students and allowing them to complete coursework in the master class limits the long term flexibility of your master course.
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