Curriki Leaders

One of our Curriki Leaders group members, a group leader from http://MaritimeTraining.groups.curriki.org, recently asked:

"I have several folders that I would like to put into Curriki with several documents in each folder. Is there a way to upload many files in one go or must it be one file at a time? I don't understand how to put the documents into their respective courses if so. Is there a "how to" page of instructions?"

To answer the first part of the question:

Right now, the only way to batch upload content is to Zip it, then upload the Zip file to Curriki. By doing this, you create a single new resource in the repository, so you only complete the process of providing Information Settings once; the down side to this approach, of course, is that your materials can’t be found or used individually. We at Curriki.org are working on this problem, what we call “batch uploading,” and hoping to launch a solution later in 2009.

And on organizing documents into courses or folders:

Right now you can accomplish what you want in terms of organizing your materials into folders within one or more courses by doing the following:

 

1. Click the “Create Group Collection” button on your group’s Curriculum tab (or the “Create New Collection” button for individuals using their Collections tabs in My Curriki).
   
   
   
2. In a pop-up window, you will be asked to name and describe your collection (which in your case is a course), then select its subject area and educational level, as well as choose one of Curriki’s “Instructional Component Types” (ICTs). For your ICT, if you are building a course, pick “Full Course” under the Curriculum category.
   
   
   
3. After you click Next, you will find another dialog where you can select additional settings; all of these settings either take a default based on your group settings, or are not required. Once you click Next from that screen, you will see a confirmation message that your collection has been created.  Close the confirmation message and click on your new resource to view your collection.
   
   
   
4. While viewing your collection, click the “Build Up” link at the top right of the tab et to insert a file or folder into this collection. You may want to start by inserting the folder-level structure first. To do this, pick “Folder” from the pop-up menu.
   
   
   
5. (If your course collection doesn’t need units, you don’t have to create folders at this point. You can just go ahead and add specific documents and files into your course collection.)
   
6. If you choose to create a folder, you will be prompted to do what’s described above in 2 and 3, although this time you might pick “Unit” for your ICT if the folder will represent one unit in your course. After you finish the information settings and click Next, you will see your folder appear in the Table of Contents as the level below the collection you created when starting with 1 above.
   
   
   
7. Now you can continue to create other folders inside your collection to represent additional units within your course, or you can start placing individual documents inside the first folder. Some people find it easiest to create the whole course structure first, then upload individual files into their correct folders.
   
   
   
8. PLEASE NOTE: When you create a collection or a folder, or create/upload an individual file, all of these are recognized within the Curriki repository as individual modules of content, so each gets its own information settings, and each can be returned within search results (unless you choose the “Hide from Search” setting). There are essentially three types of content modules recognized and presented within Curriki:
   

Collections, which appear on your Curriculum tab listing (or on the Collections tab in My Curriki), and can hold folders and/or individual resources

Folders, which can be placed inside collections and can hold other folders and/or individual resources
 

Individual or “simple” resources, which can be created on or uploaded to Curriki, and might be a single PDF worksheet, or an entire course in a Zip archive


 

1. When you are ready to add individual files into your course collection or unit folders, you will again use the “Build Up” button. From this menu, you can choose to add a file from your computer, or you can also create new material directly on Curriki by adding a “Blank Content Block” that is a simple wiki resource, with an editing toolbar like a word processor.
   
   

Going forward, you can also add to your course collection by clicking the "Add" link to the right of the resource, folder, or collection title that you would like to add to your group collection.  You can also click "Edit Info" next to the collection title to update the information settings, or "Organize"  in order to move and remove content into different instructional sequences, etc.

For more information...

Take a look at the following locations for more information about creating collections, information settings on Curriki, and more:

The Sample Course Collection which you can find on the Curriki Leaders group Curriculum tab

 

The Curriki Help Collection, linked from HELP in the left navigation panel, specifically the About the Resource Repository folder and the Contributing to & Editing Resources folder.