Returning students are unlikely to go straight to our homepage, opting for their eportfolio accounts or courses instead. But students who log in on our courses site, Learn, are unlikely to have much ongoing use for the homepage there.

Selection from the Learn homepage

Sure, it’s nice to feel welcome. It’s less nice, though, to be asked day after day if you’re ready to begin. At what point does it become impolite for us to invite you to watch a short video on getting started? Should we roll out the entire course catalog every time you come back, just in case you forgot since yesterday that you’re welcome to enroll in other courses? (To answer our own rhetorical questions: “Some time ago” and “No”.)

We’re fixing this: now, when a registered student is logged in, the default home page will by “My Home”, at the URL https://learn.saylor.org/my (do you have a Saylor Academy account? Go ahead; try it!)

▸ If you happen to have previously customized your “My” page, you will want to click the customize button and reset to defaults to see any changes.

Instead of general welcome information and our course catalog, by default you will see progress bars for each of your courses, allowing you to jump quick to where you left off.The basic layout looks just like this:

 

The "My Home" at learn.saylor.org

Other features:

  • In the left sidebar (bigger screens) or at the bottom of the page (smaller screens), you will also see:
    • A Navigation block that allows you to see the regular site home page and to navigate to any part of any course, including your final exam attempts and Accredible course completion certificates.
    • An Activity block that allows you to view and edit your profile as well as view your grades and attempts of course assessments and final exams (activity reports).
    • News and Updates block that pulls from our blog’s RSS feed.
  • In the main content area, below your course progress bars, you can also view a list of both your current and completed courses. You may prefer this to the progress bar view of courses because you will be able to control how many courses display by default (a useful setting if you have a lot of current and/or completed courses).
  • Clicking on the minus sign within the box by any block will minimize that block. If you close a block and leave it closed when you log out, it will still be closed when you come log in again.
  • Click on the Customise this page button to change the layout and appearance of your My Home page. With this tool, you can:
    • move blocks around by drag-and-drop using the four-way arrow symbol
    • change settings for some blocks
    • hide any blog from the page
    • delete a block from the page
    • add some new blocks to your page or add back one that you have deleted
    • reset the page appearance to our default setting.
  • Note that in the “breadcrumb trail” Home is now replaced by My Home (in the dark gray strip above the content). As you navigate through a course, you will always be able to quickly get back to your My Home page.

Explore your new homepage now!

Share your thoughts with us! What would you like to see? What can we change? Not everything you might wish for will be easy, immediate, or even feasible, but we listen closely and take your feedback seriously; the more, the better!

Photo credit: Visual hunt | CC0 | Modifed