Computer Laboratory

Course pages 2012–13

Instructions for lecturers

Most lecturers now place material for their students on the web. To support this, the Computer Laboratory creates each year a new set of directories, to ensure that outdated material is not left in the main student access path.

Each course has its own directory, which this year can be found at: 

  /anfs/www/html/teaching/1213/courseid                under Unix/Linux
= \\filer\www\html\teaching\1213\courseid              under Windows
= http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/1213/courseid/      web pages
= http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/current/courseid/   year-invariant alias

Please consult the lecturer index to find your pages.

External lecturers: In order to access the above directory on our central fileserver from outside the Computer Laboratory, you first need to log in to one of our Linux servers (usually: slogin.cl.cam.ac.uk), using a secure shell client (e.g., ssh, scp, putty, winscp). If you do not have this setup already, please contact sys-admin@cl.cam.ac.uk, and provide them with an ssh public key and the IP addresses from which you want to login, and they will set up everything for you. Note that password-based login from outside the Computer Laboratory is disabled, hence the need to set up public-key authentication. See our sys-admin ssh pages for details. Alternatively, our teaching administrator (Dinah Pounds) can also place materials for you on the web server.

An easy to edit, undecorated, “bare-bones” HTML file, materials-b.html, has been placed into your directory, where you can add any information that you would like to make available to your students. The actual course-materials page, materials.html, is automatically generated from that file after you type "make" under Linux. (If there is no materials-b.html file, you can edit index-b.html instead, but this applies only to a few pages where there is no syllabus.)

A principal lecturer has been assigned for each course. This person is the owner of the directory and of all the files in it and is responsible for the content of the directory. He or she is encouraged to add appropriate files to the directory and to modify materials-b.html so that students can access these files. To recreate all the *.html files from the respective *-b.html files, run the UNIX command: 

  /anfs/www/tools/bin/ucampas -r

Simply typing “make” will achieve the same, thanks to the also provided Makefile. (A trick to make that call conveniently from Windows is suggested in the Ucampas FAQ.)

The subdirectory http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/1213/courseid/supervisors/ is for materials only intended for supervisors (who have to authenticate themselves via Raven), such as solution notes for exercises. Edit the file supervisors/.htaccess in order to grant access to individual supervisors that contact you, as explained in the comments in that file. (This file also explains how you can grant access to your students after the end of lectures and supervisions.)

Changes

Reminder: there have been a number of improvements in 2011:

  • New file structure: Your course materials directory may now contain several web pages and a row of navigation tabs links them all together. The name of the file in which you place your course-materials content will have changed from index-b.html to materials-b.html in many cases. Please do not edit files where an HTML comment advises against doing so.
  • New syllabus page. The HTML version of the syllabus, which previously was located elsewhere on the web site, is now the first of your course pages. You are not supposed to edit that yourself, as the syllabus is edited and frozen in August and substantial changes require teaching-committee approval. To update the LaTeX source (/homes/ncc25/syllabus/coursesetc/) of your undergraduate syllabus, please contact the Teaching Administrator (Dinah Pounds). To update the HTML source (/anfs/www/html/teaching/current/syllabi/) of your Part III/MPhil syllabus, please contact the Graduate Administrator (Lise Gough).
  • New assessment page (for Part III and MPhil ACS courses): there is also an assessment-b.html page where you need to explain in detail how you are going to assess the course. This might include information about deadlines for essays or the dates and details of exams, as well as how the final mark will be calculated from all the assessed student contributions.
  • New access rights: All the course directories now belong to (and are by default writeable for) a new Unix group "teaching", which comprises all the lecturers teaching a course this year, plus teaching administrators. This will make collaboration easier in courses taught by several people, and also allows administrators to help with placing materials online or fixing typos. To preserve group write access, make sure the Linux command “umask” outputs “0002”. (If you prefer to disable group write access, you can easily do this with the Linux tools chgrp or chown.)

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