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By default, LATTE course shells uses the Collapsible Topics format. Below the course banner, several sections, called Topics, are available to organize the class activities and resources. The Topics can be populated and modified in many ways to suit the needs of the course and instructor.
Topics can be expanded and collapsed by any page viewer by clicking the triangle next to each topic’s title. To open all topics on the LATTE course page, click Expand All.
To modify your topics or their contents, first, click the Turn Editing On button. With editing turned on, click the pencil edit icon next to a Topic name. Type in a new title for the Topic, such as the date of the class session or the number and title of the course unit. Press Enter on your keyboard to save the new title. Pressing the Esc key or clicking elsewhere on the page before saving will cancel the change.
You can move topics to reorder them in two ways; both start with the arrows icon that appears on the left side of each topic when editing is turned on.
Option 1: Click and hold the selected topic’s arrows icon to drag the topic to its new position.
Option 2: Click once on the arrows icon to bring up a full list of the course topics, then choose a new position for your selected topic from that list. Click any topic in the list to move the selected topic to that position. The other topics will shift to accommodate the change.
Activities and resources can also be moved using either of these methods.
Navigate to the topic you want to delete, click Edit , then Delete topic.
IMPORTANT: Deleting a topic will also delete anything inside it; be sure you have moved anything you want to keep into another topic before deleting.
To add a new topic, scroll to the last topic on the course page and click + Add topics.
A dialog box will pop up to allow you to choose how many new sections to create. Each course can have up to 52 topic sections.
Labels are a great tool for adding structure and organization to your Topic sections.
New Labels can be created from the Activity Chooser at any time. To make a new Label, you will use the LATTE Text Editor to combine text, images, and multimedia to your liking.
You can change the visibility of any topic from the Edit menu on its right side. Clicking Highlight, Hide, or Show Topic (from a hidden topic) in the Edit menu will immediately change the visibility of that topic.
Highlighting a topic makes that topic expand automatically for your students and adds a blue border to its left edge to call attention to it, even when collapsed. In the selected topic’s Edit menu, click Highlight. Only one topic can be highlighted at a time; highlighting a different topic will remove the highlight from the previous one. You can also remove the topic highlight by opening the Edit menu on the highlighted topic and clicking Remove Highlight.
In the topic’s Edit menu, click Hide. When a topic is hidden, students will not be able to see the topic or any of the activities and resources the topic contains. You will know a topic is hidden from the students' view when the topic title shows the “Hidden from students” notice and the font color turns gray.
In the topic’s Edit menu, click Show Topic, which will have replaced the Hide topic option. This makes the topic and all its visible contents available to the students immediately. If any items inside the topic are hidden individually, they will remain hidden even when the topic is visible.
If you would like to additionally customize divider labels and icons in the LATTE Shell, please contact library@brandeis.edu for instructions and resources.
You can also explore the LATTE Shell Sample Course for more ideas on how to customize topics and labels.