If you are an Author on the Sowiso platform, you can create your own exercises and then add them to the course material. There are two ways to do that:
Add a separate chapter that contains all your added exercises
Add your exercises to existing Sowiso chapters
Both options have their perks and disadvantages, as you can see in the overview below.
| Advantages | Disadvantages |
Separate chapter with your exercises | It is quite simple to group all your exercises together in order to create a new chapter. | The exercises are not displayed together with the rest of the content, which might be confusing to students. |
Integrating your exercises to existing Sowiso chapters | Exercises are displayed together with the rest of the topic. | There is some more work to do to make your own copy of the Sowiso chapter so that you can edit it. |
How to create your own chapter that will contain your new exercise(s)
Sowiso follows a specific content structure, where each exercise needs to be located in a package, subchapter, and chapter.
First, we need to create a chapter and a subchapter. Then, from the subchapter, we create a package and add exercise to it. Here is a quick video that shows how to do that:
The last step is to add your chapter to the course material so that your students can see it. Go to "Teacher", "Course material" and look for the new chapter on the right side of your screen. You can search by the chapter name, but there might be multiple chapters with the same name. If you hover with the mouse over the chapter name, you will see its ID as well. To add the chapter to your course material, right-click on its name and select "Add".
If you are replacing an existing chapter with your new chapter, remember to remove the old chapter (the one that doesn't contain your exercise) to avoid confusion.
How to integrate your exercise into an existing Sowiso chapter
In this case, you will need to have read/copy Author access to the Author group to which the particular chapter belongs. You can read more about Author access here. To get this access, please contact the Manager at your institution or support@sowiso.com.
Once you have the proper access, go to the chapter tab and find the chapter you need to copy. You can search by the name or the chapter ID. When you find your chapter, click on the copy icon to create your copy of it.
Note: When you copy a chapter, chapter ID, subchapter ID, package ID, and theory page ID will get new IDs, but the exercise IDs will stay the same. This means that you won't have your own copy of the exercises in this chapter. This is important to know if you also wish to edit some Sowiso exercises. Read more about it here.
We still need to add your new exercise(s) to the new copy of the chapter. First, find the exercise ID. Save this exercise ID because we will use it later.
Then, find the chapter that you copied from the Sowiso course material. You can find it under "Author", "Chapter" by looking for the chapter name or its ID. The copied chapter will be in your own author group where you have full authoring rights.
Open the chapter by clicking on its name or on the pencil symbol on the right. Then, find the package to which you want to add your exercise, and click on either its name or the pencil symbol to edit it. Search for your exercise on the right side of the screen by entering its ID.
After adding your exercise to the package, you can also reorder the exercises by dragging and dropping them.
Finally, we need to add the new chapter to your course material. Go to "Teacher", "Course material", and look for the new chapter on the right side of your screen. You can search by the chapter name, but there might be multiple chapters with the same name. If you hover over the chapter you will see the chapter ID as well. Right-click on it and choose "Add" and the chapter will be added to your course material.
If you are replacing an existing chapter with your new chapter, remember to remove the old chapter (the one that doesn't contain your exercise) to avoid confusion.