cse    Teaching Bulletin #1, 2021


Welcome to 21T1! A new year. A new US president. Same old COVID:-(

Contents

Upcoming Events

Some things to note ...

If you miss any of the above, they'll be recorded ... somewhere.

Setting up for 21T1

You need to make sure that by, Feb 8, 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

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

** Do not tell students to contact your personal UNSW email, and definitely don't tell them to send email to an external address (e.g. Gmail). If you don't want to monitor the class email account, bounce all this email to your own email, and also to the email of the course admin. Also, leave a copy in the class email account, and CC all replies to the class email account. Use the mlalias command to arrange all of this.

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 can check by looking at Astra.

If you have a course taken by both UG and PG, you will need to check both "versions" of the course (select the appropriate cohort when you choose the course code).

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 and me explaining clearly what changes you want.

This year it is particularly important (read: accreditation) that the Learning Outcomes in your Course Outline are consistent with those in ECLIPS. The first thing you should do is look at your course's entry in ECLIPS:

If the meaning of the Learning Outcomes (LOs) essentially matches what's in your Course Outline, regardless of precise wording, then that's ok. If not, then you need to reconcile them either by changing the LOs in your Course Outline, or by putting in a course revision in ECLIPS.

About You

Given that almost everything is happening online in Term 1, 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 (more new UG enrolments, less new PG enrolments).

You can check enrolments in your course via the website

http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~give/ClassUtil/COMPSC/21.html

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

The column you want is 5213 (aka 21T1). Courses in 21T2 and 21T3 haven't had classes timetabled yet, in case you were wondering why they look different to those in 5213.

The rows are:

CRS
# of students who enrolled in the course, but haven't yet registered for their classes (lecture/tute/lab))
LEC
#students who have registered for their lecture,
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 before term starts.

SMS and Webcms3

When you create your SMS database, use the [Add Students] feature to load the students. Webcms3 automatically loads student information when you create the course.

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). The daily enrolment data is downloaded at 3am, so you should not set your cronjob to run before that.

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.

Note that there are three independent databases that record enrolment information:

  • MyUNSW (aka NSS or SiMS)
  • SMS
  • Webcms3

Each night, CSE gets a download of all enrolments in NSS. Webcms3 syncs with NSS each night using this download. SMS syncs with NSS using the download whenever you click on [Add Students] and select Enrolments, and click on [Delete Students].

Note that Webcms3 and SMS set the students' tute and lab from the information in the NSS downloads. While you can change the apparent tute/lab enrolment in both SMS and Webcms3, it will be reset to whatever is in the NSS download each time they're sync'd. The only way to prevent this in SMS is to choose Enrolments (without classes) when you [Add Students]. Webcms3 stops updating classes after Week 2; any subsequent changes will need to be made manually.

Neither SMS nor Webcms3 can update NSS tute/lab data, so even if you change it in the local system, NSS will hold the old value which affects things like the timetable MyUNSW can give to students. Make sure that all change to tute/lab classes are sorted out as early as possible in the term.

Note that Moodle is directly connected to NSS and sync's enrolment data each night.

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 2021 T1 version, and going to that site (checking that it really is 21T1). 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).