cse Teaching Bulletin #1, 2024
Welcome to 2024! The year that will finally see a return to post-COVID normal. Maybe.
Course Outlines and Course Websites should be made public, by 12 noon Mon 5 Feb
Make sure that you
(a) you create a minimal course website for your course under Webcms3,
(b) attach the ECOS course outline to it,
(c) make it publically visible.
O-week School Welcome to new UG students, Wed 7 Feb, 11am, CLB7
SSG and others will welcome our hundreds of new UG students.
O-week School Welcome to new PG students, Wed 7 Feb, 4pm, Ainsworth G03
Eric (and others) will welcome our hundreds of new PG coursework students.
Tutor Training, Fri 9 Feb, around middle of day
Mandatory attendance for all new tutors; useful for experienced tutors. Make sure that all of your tutors are aware of this.
If you miss any of the above, they'll generally be recorded ... somewhere.
You need to make sure that by, Monday 5 Feb, you have a course website with at least a welcome message and a link to the ECOS Course Outline. 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):
Your course pages may live in a number of places (Webcms3, Moodle, ...), but there is one URL that is used in official places (Moodle, the Handbook, etc.) that must work correctly:
http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~csNNNN/
where NNNN is the four digits from the course code, e.g. 3311 for COMP3311).
You need to set things up so that anyone who visits that URL is redirected to the actual course home page.
The way we normally do this is to have a redirection link in the file
/home/csNNNN/public_html/index.html
This link is implemented as e.g.
<meta http-equiv=refresh content='0;URL=https://webcms3.cse.unsw.edu.au/COMP3311/24T1/'>
where you replace the above URL by the appropriate one for your course.
All UNSW Course Outlines need to contain at least the following info, and this is enforced by ECOS:
** 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.
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.
This assumes that Astra has been set up for your course; it may not be done when you read this. Also, Astra assumes that you are in the UNSW domain, so you may need to login to a VPN to convince it that this is the case.
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.
Given that our enrolments are huge and UNSW lecture theatres aren't that big, many students will only ever see you in Echo360 videos, so they won't get a chance to interact with you face-to-face. 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.
At this stage, it's difficult to tell where enrolments will finally end up. However, they look higher than last year (more new UG enrolments, more new PG enrolments).
You can check enrolments in your course via the website
http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~give/ClassUtil/COMPSC/24.html
This gives a slightly more understandable summary of enrolments than what you get on classutil.
The column you want is 5243 (aka 24T1). Courses in 24T2 and 24T3 haven't had classes timetabled yet, in case you were wondering why they look different to those in 5243.
The rows are:
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.
You create your SMS database by logging in to the class account and running the command
give-install -new 24T1
Once you have an SMS database, use the
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:
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
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
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.
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 2024 T1 version, and going to that site (checking that it really is 24T1). 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:
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:
Connect to the Echo360 videos
You need to add the video "section" for this offering
Done ... the link on the Moodle course page will now bring you here.
(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).
You can find additional information on setting up and running a course in the video and slides for the Course Convenor/Admin Workshop.