To create a new course.  Go to the front page of your ELMS environment.  The easiest way of doing this is clicking the first link in the top left corner of the screen.  This will always return you to the homepage for the system.

Now you should see a list of icons on the left region.  Click on the one that looks like a little person pointing to a chalkboard with a plus sign.  The only required information to create a course is Department and Title.  By default, ELMS will create an example course version as well.  You can prevent this from happening by clicking the "use as listing only" checkbox.

Courses in ELMS are basically just for reserving the name-space of the course.  Think of this as the way it would be listed in your information system such as COURSEMAME COURSENUMBER (example: Art 100).  This name will be converted to a path automatically in ELMS (example: Art 100 becomes /art100/).  All versions that you associate to this course will follow the same naming convention (example: /art100_fall/).