Hi, Sasha here, transformation manager for education and nonprofits at MURAL. Today I'm going to share with you some best practices for setting up your courses in MURAL.

All right, so you've probably seen when you first log in, you see every single mural that you created or been given access to on the screen. These are under the cleverly titled section, all murals. When you set up your courses, you're going to want to create a unique space for each course and mural. You do that in what we call rooms. Rooms can be found on the far left here. And you'll notice that there are two types of rooms, private rooms, and open rooms, open rooms are going to be rooms in which anyone that has access to your workspace can access that room. Open rooms are essentially discoverable for everyone, as well as the content in that room can be found and open and accessed by everyone in your workspace, private rooms, however are just that private. When you create a private room, only you have access until you explicitly invite in your students or colleagues directly into that room or to the murals that are in that room. So again, open rooms accessible to everyone. Private rooms only accessible to you until you decide to invite other people into that room.

 To create a room, you click the little plus button next to either private rooms or open rooms, depending on what you need. So if I click plus here, I then give it a title. We suggest that you include the course ID, as well as the course name in the room, name. That way it's really easy for your students to find when they log in. So in this case, we're going to do MU101 and then I'm going to click create room. Okay? So now I have this private room. If this was an open room, I wouldn't need to do the next step because any student would be able to log in and discover and find any content in this open room. But because this is a private room, I could either come here and click share and invite my students in by adding their email addresses or I can click create, and then share this link. Either posting it in the LMS or sharing it over email, et cetera.

Now I can start adding my content into this course, private room. One thing I like to talk about too, in relation to any room is you'll notice that you have, when you enter into MURAL, your own personal private room. If it's not there, you can always create it. What I like about the personal or personal private room is that this is where you can go to kind of have a staging area or creation area. So you can start building out your course or class murals before you actually move them into the course private room. That way you can make sure everything's, you know, ready to go before you actually move it in and make it live. Once you have your murals ready, you can either duplicate them or copy them into your course room or you can move them entirely.

 To duplicate you just click a little drop down here, click on duplicate, update the name. If you want, we typically suggest that you include the date for each mural or each class that you're moving into your course private room, or course open room. Then you just choose the room you want to move it into and click duplicate. So now you have a copy in your private room, as well as in your personal room as well. If I go back to the personal room, if you didn't want to make a copy, you just wanted to move it, you just click the dropdown and choose, move, and then choose the room you want to move it into, click move and that's it.

So again, just to rehash, you're going to create a room for each course you're teaching. You're going to give it a title that includes the course ID, as well as the course name that way it can differentiate if you create extra rooms for projects and things like that and everything is easily find-able when your students log in to access open rooms or those that are going to be available to everyone in your workspace, whether that's your own personal workspace or a university workspace that you're using versus a private room or in which you only, you have access until you explicitly invite in your students or colleagues. Hope this has been helpful. Appreciate your time. See you again soon.