Combine Course Sites Request
If you want your ICON course sites combined into a single site, send email to icon-admin@engineering.uiowa.edu
Respondus LockDown Browser is a customized browser that prevents students from printing, copying, going to another URL, etc., while taking quizzes on-line in ICON. On the Respondus page you will find download and installation directions, and documentation on how to use it.
ICON's dropbox and Turnitin's Plagiarism Detection service: instructors can set the ICON dropbox to automatically submit student files to the Turnitin service. Read the ICON on-line help about the plagiarism connection with ICON.
ICON Course Management
ICON is the course-management system used across campus. All College of Engineering courses are automatically created in ICON. Until the instructor activates a course, the files and content are not visible, so just because an ICON course site has been created does not mean that students can use it or that instructors must use ICON.
The College encourages using ICON to help administer courses and for FERPA compliance in posting grades.
View the rights and roles for Instructor-Designer, TA-Designer, TA Levels 1 and 2, and Course Builder. If the TA is known to MAUI, that person is assigned the roleof TA (High Level, L1).
News
Help Center
ITS maintains an ICON Help Center that has links to news, known issues, and help for instructors and students.
Training
ITS offers hands-on training about ICON and various tools available to course instructors.
ICON Topics
Activate/Deactivate an ICON Course Site
By default, ICON courses created and populated from Registrar information is unavailable to students; that is, they cannot access it even though their names appear in the Classlist.
To make your course available, click Activate Course button from the ICON Dashboard. Or follow the steps below:
- From the Course Home, click Edit Course in the NavBar.
- Click Course Offering Information.
- Check the IsActive textbox.
- Click Save.
At the end of the semester, you must deactivate the course if you no longer want students to have access to the course site. Making your course unavailable at the end of the term allows you to keep student data without allowing them access. To make the course unavailable (students can no longer access it from their MyHome page), click to remove the check mark from the IsActive text box in step 3 above.
Course Sections
The default action for course creation is to create one ICON course site per section. If you want courses merged into a single ICON course site, use this form.
Copy Course Content
You can create a course as a development site and copy content to a live course at the appropriate time. You can also copy content from an existing ICON course to another ICON course.
File Types, File Size, Media Files
You cannot upload .exe files and other file types such as .shtml, .ini, .dll, to an ICON course. Make any such files a .zip file(s) and then upload. Use WinZIP or WinRAR (Windows) or GZip (Linux) for that task. See Restricted File Extensions.
There is no limit to file size, but if the file is very large, you and your students may get a timeout error when up- or down-loading the file.
ICON is not optimized for streaming files and ITS does not recommend uploading video and audio files directly into ICON. Read the ITS page on Restricted File Extensions. Contact the ITS Help Desk (its-helpdesk@uiowa.edu or 319-384-4357) to request that someone from the Digital Media Support Team will work with you.
Guest Student | Preview User
There are two roles possible for an individual who is not enrolled in a course but to whom you want to give access to an ICON course site: Guest Student and Preview User.
The Guest Student role is exactly the same as the student role, with one exception: since guest IDs are not governed by the Hawk ID system, they have a local password, and therefore need a way to change their passwords locally. Therefore, Guest Student has the password change tool turned on, where as normal users don't. The only time that role needs to be used is when you create a guest ID, used when the person does not have a Hawk ID. When you use the Create New User option, it automatically generates an ID in the guest format, which is g#_name.
The Preview role allows anyone with web access to enter your course and view your content-type materials, including content files, news, and announcements. Preview users cannot, however, view quizzes, discussions, or other interactive areas.
Switch to Student View
When you role switch to the .student view, what you see is mostly what a student sees. You cannot take surveys or quizzes, but the course content view is accurate. See the on-line help for more information.
Help
There is an abundance of on-line help with ICON. From the ICON dashboard, in the upper right corner is the link to ICON help, which includes an instructor FAQ. Go directory to the ICON Help Center, which has links to news, known issues, and help for instructors and students. On-line help covers how to get started using ICON, how to move files from another ICON course site, and each of the components of ICON, such as calendar, content, class list, discussion, gradebook, and quizzes. There are on-line videos within ICON as well, as shown here.
Within the college, you can get help by sending email.