Cleaning Up the 'About the Course' Page in CoursePlus
Late last year, during a faculty teaching workshop, the Center received quite a bit of feedback about the organization and functionality of the "About the Course" page in CoursePlus sites. We took that feedback to heart, and are working on a long-term series of changes to this page and how information is gathered and presented on this page.
As a first step, though, we've implemented a small change that will hopefully improve the readability of the "About the Course" page.
Prior to this change, if there was no information for a section of the "About the Course" page whose content was pulled from the official School catalog, the following text would appear beneath the section title:
No catalog information is available at this time.
Quite a few courses had more than one section like this. As a result, many "About the Course" pages were cluttered with a lot of extra boxes that added no value to the page. If there were multiple sections like this, faculty and students would have to scroll through a lot of extraneous, and, frankly, wasted space to see everything on the "About the Course" page.
As of today, these sections no longer appear on the "About the Course" page of a CoursePlus site if there's no associated information in the School's catalog. As a result, "About the Course" pages are shorter, clearer, and contain only information relevant to that course.
More changes will be coming to the "About the Course" page in CoursePlus in the future, but this a small start that we hope you like.