Many of the Files spaces in learn.gold course areas might be politely described as 'wild gardens'. They end up frustrating their owners - particularly at roll-over time in each new academic year. And potentially they are hard work for colleagues too - co-tutors, tutors who inherit the course, visiting tutors who take over during research leave, &tc. So here is a general stab at helping to save time and hassle. It's aimed primarily at staff, but with principles about naming and storing files which are relevant to everyone.
In learn.gold it is possible to save yourself a lot of time by putting groups of files in folders, rather than just uploading them to wherever they land. And this also helps to avoid excessive linking from the front page of your area. Instead, you can link - just once - to a folder containing, say, the week's materials. But if you do take advantage of this, it is particularly important that you do something you should be doing anyway: name your files really well.
Basically, good file-names:
- are as short as possible - you can miss out grammatical words
- contain the most important words at the beginning
- communicate what is in the file without it needing to be opened
- distinguish that file from other files
Below are some principles for using files and folders on learn.gold.
In most file management software – including learn.gold’s – files are presented by default in alphanumeric order. So if you want files in a folder to appear in a certain order, a straightforward way is to precede their name with a number. And precede single digit numbers with 0 – otherwise 11 will appear before 1.
For example, a folder titled external_marx_presentations, which you link from the front page of your learn.gold area with the text 'Marx - Monday evening presentation series', might contain:
- 01_marx_overview_lloyd.ppt
- 02_marx_in_london_ishmael.ppt
- 03_marx_kapital_wheen.ppt
- The number dictates the order in which the files will appear in any folder (on and off learn.gold). This might correspond to weekly events, or the order in which you want the files to be viewed.
- The ‘marx’ bit is helpful for anybody who downloads the file to store locally, which they might well do.
- The remainder is the topic of the lecture and the family name of the presenter
One other thing to mention. Since the upgrade, you can move and rename files without breaking any links from your area's front page. This is cause for a halleluja.
If any of this isn't clear, then don't hesitate to contact your learning technologists either personally or all at once on celt@gold.ac.uk.
*It's a good idea to save Word files as .rtf, as long as you don't have pictures.
**Computers dislike spaces in file-names - learn.gold replaces them with underscores.