CTL Blog

Link to a Specific Drop Box from Schedule Builder

October 11, 2021 | 2 Minute Read

Schedule Builder is a powerful and flexible tool for organizing and controlling links to the content of your course. For a very long time, you have been able to link to the Drop Box tool from Schedule Builder, but only to the main Drop Box page and not specific Drop Boxes.

This is generally fine, but there are cases when Drop Boxes in a class have very similar names. Students sometimes get confused between similarly named Drop Boxes. Being able to link to a specific Drop Box from the Schedule Builder tool wasn’t possible, until now.

You can now link to a specific Drop Box from the Schedule Builder tool. This enables you to make it so that students go directly to the Drop Box you want them to see, without first clicking through the main Drop Box page.

When you select an item in the Schedule Builder to be linked to the Drop Box, you’ll now see a list of all Drop Boxes in your course website:

Listing of individual Drop Boxes when linking to a Drop Box from the Schedule Builder tool

You can select a specific Drop Box, or the main Drop Box page, as you could in the past.

The Drop Box has a number of features around submission availability and submission restrictions that continue to be enforced even if the Schedule Builder links directly to a specific Drop Box. If the Drop Box is not open for submissions, students are shown that information. If the Drop Box is a timed Drop Box, students are shown the first step in the process of unlocking the timed Drop Box.

Please note that you cannot link to a Drop Box that is available only to a specific course group. Because the items on the main course content/schedule page are shown to everyone in the class, you cannot link to a Drop Box that is available only to a subset of students. You can, however, continue to link to the main Drop Box page and that group-specific Drop Box will only be visible to students who are part of that group.

As always, if you have questions or concerns about the Drop Box tool in CoursePlus, please contact CTL Help!