You can use UM.CourseTools to make announcements; share resources, such as documents and URLs; to provide online discussion boards for your classes; or to have students work on and submit assignments electronically, either individually or in collaboration with their peers. UM.CourseTools also includes other campus resources, such library resources and official classlists for managing access to your course website.

You do not need to know HTML to use the UM.CourseTools, but it can be used if you need finer control over the documents you want to present to your students.

Getting Started
You can get started using UM.CourseTools by opening the UM.CourseTools homepage and clicking "My Workspace".

You will be asked to log in with your uniqname and umich password. Then, follow the instructions on the screen to set up your Workspace.

You will still be able to locate all your sites, published or not, via the link

http://coursetools.ummu.umich.edu/myworkspace/

How to Publish
To publish your site(s), do the following:

1. Login to http://coursetools.ummu.umich.edu/myworkspace/

2. Select the "Publish a course site" link from the Tools section

3. Choose a site to publish...

4. Select the division for this course site from the pick list

5. Enter the course number

6. Enter any additional notes about cross-listings, special requests, or details that might be helpful to the CourseTools staff

7. And click "Make this Request"

The time period to process a publication request is usually 24 hours or less. Between the time you request publication for a given site, and the time the request is processed, the site will need to be locked and you will not be able to make changes. This allows the system to safely move and update your site without catching you at work.

Since the site will be unavailable to you in this window of time, don't rush to make a publish request. Rather, if you still have things you'd like to do in the site, do those first, and then follow the steps listed below. After the publish process is complete you can pick up where you left off and continue to modify and update the site.

After you have submitted a site to be published, you will receive an acknowledgement via email, and will be notified again when the request has been processed and completed.

Any bookmarks or links to the 'old', unpublished URL for a site will be redirected to the 'new', published URL. If you have distributed the unpublished URL, people will still be able to locate the site. However, it would be a good idea to update your bookmarks, and to include only the published URL in future communications.

Access to the Site
Publishing a site grants access to officially registered students in the sections you have included for this site. Once a day, these groups will be updated with new adds and drops to make sure that students who need access to this site will have it. (Any individuals you have added from within coursetools will still have access. This update just handles the official registration information.)

Once you publish, the site is 'live', and both you and your students will be working with the same version.

Student Access to the Site
The https://my.ummu.umich.edu/ URL is a *student* gateway only, and the lists/links it presents are based on official registrar data about enrollments. You and your assistants will not be included in this official data, so you will not see links to courses you are teaching at this URL. Use your workspace at CourseTools for easy access to all your sites.

Publishing a site updates the directory of all UM courses with the published URL for your site. When this is done, students can go to

https://my.ummu.umich.edu/

to login, see all the courses for which they are officially registered, and follow direct links for any course which has a URL associated with it. This means that when you publish a site, a URL for it will be added to the directory, and your students will be able to locate your site(s) without having to remember a list of longer URLs.