As well as a personal tool, Scholar can be used as a course tool. When the instructor is ready they can easily enable a Scholar Course Home page for each course (see Registering a Course with Scholar). The Scholar Course Home page works in the same way as the Personal home page (My Scholar Home), with the exception that only the instructor can add or remove Streams on the Scholar Course home page. Students view and interact with the Streams, but can not change the Streams on the Scholar Course Home page. An instructor can create a Scholar Course Home page for each course they are teaching, by following the following simple instructions (see Registering a Course with Scholar)

Scholar as a Teaching, Teacher Centred or Course Tool. A Scholar Course Home page:

• Provides structure to students to direct them in their exploration and use of course and discipline resources
• Allows resources to be pushed out to students
• A basis for setting activities for students to engage with resources (see below)

A Scholar Course Home page allows you to:

• manage your web links for each course
• organize your web links within each course by course topics (Tags)
• use terms in your discipline as topics to organize your web links (Tags)
• push web links and an organizational structure of topics and discipline terms out to students
• direct students, by example, to an organizational structure for resources in the discipline and terms (Tags) to use in saving their bookmarks
• direct students towards Tags to use so that their resources are shown on the Scholar Course Home page Streams

A Scholar Course Home page is:

• only viewable by students and instructors in a course
• only accessible via the Blackboard Learning system on which the course is located and only from within the course
• Course Tags are only viewable by students and instructors in a course

Useful Streams for an Instructor to save on a  Scholar Course Home page (see Adding Streams in Customizing the Scholar Home Pages to accomplish the below)

• a Stream based on a Search of items classified with the Course Tag for the course (shows all items that all class members save with the Course Tag)
• a Stream based on a Search of items classified with the Course Tag AND Add Criteria for User Names of the Instructor's Scholar user name (shows all items saved by the Instructor only, with the Course Tag)
• a Stream based on a Search of items classified with the Discipline Tag for the course (shows all items that are saved by any user of Scholar with the Discipline Tag e.g. all Biology items)
• a Stream based on a Search of items classified with the Discipline Tag AND Add Criteria for User Role of Instructor (shows all items that are saved by any Instructor who uses Scholar with the Discipline Tag e.g. all Biology items saved by Instructors only)

Users of Scholar do naturally converging to use the same Tags to categorize resources e.g. web2.0 rather than web20. A Scholar Course home page which shows one or more Streams displaying bookmarks saved by the instructor with their organization and use of terms (Tags) speeds up this process of convergence and increases the value of resources to students in the class.

Sample Student Activities for use with a Scholar Course Home Page

• find and add resources to Scholar which best summarize a topic
• find resources for and against an argument
• find a biased or misleading resource on a topic
• answer instructor set questions which require examination of resources
  

See Scholar as a Learner Centered Tool to further extend the use of Scholar