cse    Teaching Bulletin #1, 2023

Welcome to 2023! The year that will finally see a return to post-COVID normal. Maybe.

Contents

• Upcoming
• Setting up for 23T1
• Course Home Page
• Course Outlines
• Enrolment Numbers
• SMS and Webcms3
• Moodle
• Additional Information

http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~csNNNN/

/home/csNNNN/public_html/index.html

<meta http-equiv=refresh content='0;URL=https://webcms3.cse.unsw.edu.au/COMP3311/23T1/'>

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.

• login to Astra with zID and zPass
• select "5233 Term 1 2023"
• click on Prepare > Structure
• select your Course code (if available)
• scroll down to Assessment Item Hierarchy

This assumes that Astra has been set up for your course; it may not be done when you read this.

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 after 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.

It is important 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:

• login to above link with zID/zPass
• type course code into search box under Academic Items
• click on (COURSE)
• click on the arrow in the most recently [Approved] version
• scroll down to Learning Outcomes

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.

Finally, the Course Outline should contain a statement about the use of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT. Stuart Prescott from Chemical Engineering has written a nice put-down of these tools, which you might want to include in the Student Conduct section.

Artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT, CoPilot, CodePilot, and built-in tools within Word are modern tools that are useful in some circumstances, but reliance on them is not a path to success at university or in your later career. Reaching for a calculator to add up 1+1 is possible but not professionally sustainable for an engineer or scientist (or one might say in our educated society at all!), and that is why you learnt to do that yourself at primary school. Likewise, in your degree at UNSW, we're teaching you skills that are needed for your professional life, which is a combination of some things that AI could feasibly do for you and lots of things that the AI tools cannot do for you — if we were only teaching you things that AI could do, your degree would be worthless and you wouldn't have a job in 5 years. You can therefore see that from an academic standards perspective, the output from an AI tool will be below the minimum standards expected for a course, even if you were to submit it (which you should not!). Your ability to complete later assessments where AI cannot help you will also be compromised if you've relied upon AI earlier.

It is also worth remembering what these AI tools such as ChatGPT are: they are only statistical models about how groups of words frequently appear. These AI based tools are not smart, they don't know anything other than how words are often grouped, and they most certainly do not understand any of the content from any of your courses. Some consequences of their word-statistics and non-scientific basis are:

• They generate confident-sounding text that is completely wrong from a technical point of view.
• The text mangles jargon very badly.
• The output gets causality backwards and so often argues completely the wrong thing.
• The output will include unit conversions but it will often get them wrong.
• They generate text that is often very generic, bland, lacking on detail, and not actually very helpful.
• The output is often just a collection of loosely related factual-sounding sentences that don't answer the question that was actually asked.

In summary, the AI tools generate text output that is superficially reasonable, very confident sounding, and very often wrong. We are setting an expectation that our graduates should out-perform AI, meaning that it is a tool of limited academic use in your degree.

About You

Given that many classes are happening online (again!) 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.

http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~give/ClassUtil/COMPSC/23.html

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

The column you want is 5233 (aka 23T1). Courses in 23T2 and 23T3 haven't had classes timetabled yet, in case you were wondering why they look different to those in 5233.

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

You create your SMS database by logging in to the class account and running the command

give-install -new 23T1

Once you have an 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 ~webcms3/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**. Some people find this email annoying, but I fid it Useful to check that the class update worked ok each day. Let me know if there are error messages in the email.

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

• MyUNSW (aka NSS or SiMS)
• Moodle (which is kept in sync with MyUNSW)
• 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 sync's enrolment data from MyUNSW 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 2023 T1 version, and going to that site (checking that it really is 23T1). 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).

Note that 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 2023TP1 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).

Additional Information

You can find additional information on setting up and running a course in the video and slides for the Course Convenor/Admin Workshop.