Introduction

Texas Gateway and Gateway Courses use the structure of your content to enable navigation. How you structure your resources and sections in the Texas Gateway CMDS determines how a resource or course will appear to a user in the edX-powered Gateway Courses platform, or in the Texas Gateway content viewer.

This lesson provides instruction and tips on how to structure your content so that users can easily navigate through it in Texas Gateway and Gateway Courses. Well-designed navigation enables users to move through the course easily, return to a section after leaving the course, quickly jump forward and backward, and avoid lengthy scrolling or searching through your content.

Sections Provide Navigation in Texas Gateway

In the Texas Gateway content viewer (in the View tab if you are signed into CMDS), sections of a resource appear along the left side. As you scroll vertically through the resource, the current section is highlighted with a dot. 

The title that you entered when you created the section appears as the title in the left navigation. You can jump between sections by clicking titles in the left navigation. 

Segmenting your resource into Sections enables a user to more easily navigate through the resource. A long resource with fewer sections could require a user to scroll excessively in order to find or return to a particular paragraph or passage that interests them. 

How Resources and Sections affect Navigation in Gateway Courses

In Gateway Courses, resources from the CMDS become subsections of the course. They appear in the left navigation panel, and allow users to quickly jump from one course section to another.

Sections of resources in CMDS become Units in a course, with tabs across the main content area of the course. Unit tabs allow easy navigation through a course subsection by clicking on a tab, or using the forward and backward arrows. Resources and sections from CMDS that are right-sized enable fast, smooth navigation through a course. Long resources with too many sections create too many unit tabs, and excessive scrolling up and down through a unit’s ‘page’.

The following figure shows how the sections of a resource become tabs or pages within a course. See What will my course look like when it is ported to Gateway Courses (edX)? in the CMDS Help Center.

To help students understand course navigation, most Gateway Courses provide the following information in the Course Info tab: 

Navigating the Course

To begin taking the course, click on the Courseware tab in the top navigation. Once you enter the course, the navigation for the course content will be located on the left side of the page. Click on the title of the first lesson to begin viewing the course content. Each lesson contains several sections, or content pages. Once you’re in a lesson, you can use the arrows at the top and the bottom of the content page to navigate between sections. When you have reached the last section of the lesson, the forward arrow will be grayed out, and you will not be able to move forward. At that point, you should move to the next lesson by clicking on its title in the left navigation.

If you exit the course and later re-enter it, you will receive a message that reminds you of which lesson you were most recently in. If you click on the hyperlinked lesson title, you will be taken to the lesson and section where you left off. You can re-enter lessons you have already viewed at any time. Note that when you re-enter a lesson, you will always be taken to the section you have most recently viewed.

Navigation and Resuming a Gateway Course

Planning your resources and sections with Gateway Course navigation in mind will help your readers progress through a course, stopping and resuming, or returning to review course sections and units to reinforce or brush up on course content.

Gateway Courses “remember” where a user was most recently in the course. If a user temporarily leaves the course before completing it, the Gateway Courses navigation enables the user to return to where they left off. The following figure shows an example.