cse    Teaching Bulletin #1, 2020


Welcome to 2020! A new HoS. A new Dean. A new Flexibility Week. We live in interesting times.

Contents

Upcoming

Some things to note ...

Setting up for 20T1

You need to make sure that by February 5**, you have a course website, with at least a welcome message and a link to the Course Outline. The welcome message could be either a video or simply a notice posted on the course web site.

** "Why Februrary 5??" you say. Because this year we want to review Course Outlines at the Education Committee meeting on February 7.

Course Outlines

CSE has a reputation for having a "diverse" range of Course Outline styles. Much as I hate conformity, we need to make sure that all of our Course Outlines are (a) accessible, and (b) contain all required information. Having a consistent style would be ideal, but we can work towards that.

All UNSW Course Outlines need to contain at least the following info:

Note that Assessment is the main section that students read and must be clear and complete, and importanly, must be consistent with what's in Astra for your course. You can check how you course is configured by looking at this Mei Cheng special page. If you want to do assessment differently to what's scheduled here, then you'll need to fix then The critical thing is that your Course Outline and Astra and AIMS are consistent. If things need changing in Astra, send email to cse.teaching@unsw.edu.au explaing clearly what changes you want.

Other useful things to include:

The Course Outline template provided by Webcms3 provides a lot of the "boiler-plate" stuff above. If you don't use Webcms3, feel free to copy from e.g. the COMP3311 Course Outline.

If you're Course Outline isn't up to scratch by Feb 5, you'll be required to fix it.

Also, part of your Course Outline is the assessment structure. While you're writing this up check that it's consistent with what's in Astra for your course (note PG and UG components are separate in Astra).

Enrolment Numbers

At this stage, it's difficult to tell where enrolments will finally end up, especially for first year courses. However, they look comparable to last year; maybe we've reached to top of the cycle.

You can check enrolments in your course via the website

http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~give/ClassUtil/COMPSC/20.html

This gives a slightly more understandable summary ofenrolments than what you get on classutil.

The column you want is 5203 (aka 20T1). Courses in later terms haven't had classes timetabled yet, in case you were wondering why they look different to those in 5203.

The rows are:

CRS
# of students who enrolled in the course, but haven't yet registered for their classes (lecture/tute/lab))
LEC/WEB
#students who have registered for their lectureor web stream),
TLB or TUT or LAB
# of students who have registered for their tute/lab/etc classes

The values are Actual/Quota. If the total tute/lab quota exceeds the total LEC+WEB quota, then you have a problem. Report this to cse.teaching.

SMS and Wecms3

When you create you SMS database, please use the "Add from NSS" feature to load the students.

If using Webcms3 in conjunction with SMS, create a cron job that synchronises the SMS database and the Webcms3 database each night. Use "crontab -e" in the class account to edit your course's cron jobs. Something like: 

06  05  *  *  *   source ~/.giverc ; sh ~webcms/sms/sms_webcms3.sh

should do the trick (but don't all set it to run at 6:05am each morning)

This will generate an email to the class account, which will be bounced to your email. Useful to check that it's worked ok each day. Let me know if there are error messages in the email.

Moodle

Every CSE course has a simple Moodle site set up. You can find it by logging in to Moodle, clicking on "Site Home", searching for your course code, choosing the 2020 T1 version, and going to that site (checking that it really is 20T1). Once there, grab a copy of the URL and put that somewhere on your course web site to tell students how to reach the Moodle course site to access the Echo360 videos.

However, the Moodle site is not usable until you do the following:

  1. Make the course site visible to students

    If the course title is grey (rather than dark blue) on the Site Home search page, then students can't access the Moodle site. To fix:

    • click on "Turn editing on"
    • scroll down to Course Administration > Edit Settings
    • change Course visibility from Hide to Show
    • click "Save and Display"

  2. Connect to the Echo360 videos

    You need to add the video "section" for this offering

    • click on "Lecture Recordings"
    • click on Select a Section"
    • type in your course code
    • choose the 20TP1 label
    • click on Link Content"

    Done ... the link on the Moodle course page will now bring you here.

  3. (optional) Edit the header material at the top of the moodle page

    Click on one of the Edit links and change the content. I find it easier to edit the HTML directly (using "<>" in the editor).