What is a course site?

Every course taught at NU has a secure course website accessible only to professors and their students. The course website allows instructors to make their course materials—including documents, presentations, sound and video clips—available to their students on the World Wide Web. Most importantly, instructors are able to create and manage their course sites without having to learn HTML or other programming languages. All course sites are accessible through Northwestern’s Blackboard-based Course Management System.

How do I use the Course Management System?

To activate your course site, you will need:

• Your Northwestern NetID
• Your Northwestern University Network Identifier (NetID) and password identify you to the NU network and allow you to access a variety of resources and services such as NU calendar, NU email, library resources, IT lab printing, Blackboard and CAESAR.
• All students, faculty and staff are automatically assigned a NetID. To find out yours, please contact the Information Technologies Help Desk at 847-491-HELP
• Your Northwestern password
• This is a password that you use in conjunction with your NetID to access secure online resources from Northwestern.
• If you do not know or have forgotten your Northwestern password, please contact either the Information Technologies Information Center on the Evanston campus (Kresge Hall Room 57, phone number 847-491-4357) or the Abbott Hall Convenience Center on the Chicago campus (Abbott Hall, suite 600, phone number 312-503-3682).

Once you have this information,

1. Go to https://courses.northwestern.edu
2. Log in using your NetID and password
3. Click on the Courses tab at the top of the screen
4. On this page, you should a list of all of the courses you are teaching. Next to the names of your new course sites, you should see text reading “[unavailable].” This indicates that your students do not yet have access to this course site.

To make your course site available to your students,

1. Log in to http://courses.northwestern.edu
2. In the courses box, click on the name of the course site you wish to make available.
3. Click control panel
4. Click Settings in the Course Options area
5. Click Course Availability
6. Click the radio button left of Yes and click Submit

What do I tell my students?

• The best guidelines on what to tell your students are contained in our SCS Student Introduction to the CMS available at http://course-management.northwestern.edu/s_tip.html