Interact Subject Sites
CSU Interact subject sites are central to student learning, for each site easily allows an interactive and real-time interchange of information between a group of students and their lecturer. Subject sites are also the avenue for completing online learning activities as part of your subject content.
Interact subject sites become available 28 days before the start of a study session.
Subject sites are displayed as tabs at the top of the the main workspace site. You are able to navigate to each of your subject sites simply by clicking its site tab. To view additional sites, click the ‘More Sites’ tab. To close the window without choosing a site, click the ‘More Sites’ tab again.
Subject site tools
Within each Interact subject site there is an in-built suite of learning and teaching tools, all appearing within the left-side navigation menu. This is the Tools menu.
Due to its importance to the subject, your Subject Outline is the first document you need to read before commencing to study. Subject Outlines are published to a site 14 days prior to session commencement.
Each subject site has a variety of tools and services such as the subject forum, wiki, resources, announcements, etc. that help provide opportunities for meaningful interaction between you and your lecturer and between you and your fellow students. You click the individual tool to activate it. For instance, you would choose the Announcements tool to read in detail an announcement to all members in the group.
Within the released subject site comes a set of fixed informational tools. Fixed informational tools comprise the following subject site tools:
Announcements
EASTS
Evaluation
Subject Outline
Fixed activity tools become available to students 3 business days prior to start of session. Fixed activity tools currently comprise the following subject site tools:
Forum
Modules
Resources
You may notice that for certain subject sites your subject lecturer may have chosen to include additional activity tools, such as Wiki; Calendar; and so on.
Student access to an Interact subject site remains open to them for an additional 70 days after the close of a session. So if you want to keep for a length of time any resources from a subject site then you would need to copy the documents to, say, the Resources within your own My Workspace. Alternatively, you could save them to a portable USB drive.
Checking who's logged into a site
Located directly below the left-side navigation menu is the Presence box, which tells you who is currently logged into the subject site. This helps create a sense of 'community' among subject participants who could be located in quite diverse or distant locations from each other.
Sometimes, though, you may wish to appear 'anonymously' in a site. To hide your presence in sites go to My Workspace, select Preferences, then click the Privacy status tab towards the top of the screen. Choose the site from the drop-down menu and tick the Hide me box; then click Update.
This will now hide your presence in the selected Interact site. It's best to hide yourself only on a temporary basis since the whole idea of Interact sites is to, well, INTERACT !
Interact Subject Site Menu
Once you are in an Interact subject site you will see a number of menu items down the left-hand side. Menu items appear in alphabetical order within this list, with the exception for Home and Help which always come first and last, respectively.
Menu items are like tools which provide the means of accomplishing a task within the Interact online environment. For instance, you would choose Announcements to read in detail an announcement to all members in the group.
| Fixed items that appear on all subject sites |
Elective items that may have been selected by the subject lecturer for inclusion in a subject site |
|---|---|
 Home |
 Calendar |
 Announcements |
 Chat |
 EASTS (for DE subjects only) |
 Modules |
 Evaluation |
 Group email |
 Forum |
 News |
 Resources |
 OASIS |
 Subject Outline |
 Polls |
 Help |
 Web content |
 Wiki |
Some students may notice they have tools within a certain subject site that are not included in these two lists, like Blog, Test Centre or Podcast. This is because your subject lecturer has chosen to pilot (or test) with your student group the suitability of these tools for regular use within CSU Interact.
Your My Workspace site and your subject sites share a common set of tools, but you will notice that there is a larger number of tools available to you within a subject site.
At any time you need help with a feature or function within Interact then be sure to click Help
for contextualised help.