cse    Teaching Bulletin #3, 2020


Welcome to 20T2! A new HoS. A new Dean. A new Flexibility Week. And everything online (didn't see that coming). We live in interesting times.

Contents

Upcoming

Some things to note ...

* This has been and gone, but the video lives on: YouTube, MS-Stream

Setting up for 20T2

You need to make sure that by, May 28, you have a course website with at least a welcome message and a Course Outline (which must be in Webcms3 using the template). The welcome message could be either a video or simply a notice posted on the course web site.

A quick checklist for getting your course ready (more details below):

Course Outlines

A reminder of what I said in 20T1 on the topic of Course Outlines. If yours doesn't currently have all of this, it's not too late to fix it.

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

  • names/contacts of Convenor, other Lecturers, and Course Admin (if you have one)
  • class timetables, and consultation times
  • aims/summary (which could be copied from the Handbook)
  • pre-requisites and assumed knowledge (the latter being more important)
  • resources for students (e.g. textbooks, pointers to useful web sites)
  • teaching rationale/strategies (e.g. "we do labs because ...")
  • statements about plagiarism, special consideration, etc.
  • a schedule of which topics are covered n which weeks
  • assessment details (which items, how much each contributes to final mark, etc.)
Other useful things to include:

Note that the Schedule and Assessments are the main sections that students read and must be clear and complete. Importanly, the Assessments must be consistent with what's in Astra for your course, which you check by looking at Astra. The critical thing is that your Course Outline and Astra and SMS are consistent. If things need changing in Astra, send email to cse.teaching explaining clearly what changes you want.

About You

Given that everything is happening online, students get even less chance than usual to "put a face to the name". To overcome this somewhat, it would be worth making a short video with your face on it to introduce yourself. This could be usefully done in a video where you introduce the course as a whole ... like you'd typically do in the first lecture.

Similarly, it might be worth getting the Course Admin and maybe even the tutors to make videos introducing themselves. They're all young, so they'll have no problem making a quick selfie video.

Enrolment Numbers

At this stage, it's difficult to tell where enrolments will finally end up. However, they look comparable to last year (maybe a little less in some courses ... but don't ask Aleks about this).

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 of enrolments than what you get on classutil.

The column you want is 5206 (aka 20T2). Courses in 20T3 haven't had classes timetabled yet, in case you were wondering why they look different to those in 5206.

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 lecture 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.

At this stage, it's probably not a good idea to ask about removing or merging non-full tute or lab classes. This makes a lot of work for the TSA's, and the classes might fill up in the next few days.

SMS and Wecms3

When you create your 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.

** You should bounce all email to the class account to your own email, and probably the email of teh course admin. Use the mlalias command to do this.

Moodle

Every CSE course has a simple Moodle site set up. You can find it by logging in to Moodle, clicking on "Site Home" (top right corner of window), searching for your course code, choosing the 2020 T2 version, and going to that site (checking that it really is 20T2). 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 (if using Echo360).

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 20TP2 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).