Remarks on organizing your course

You, the lecturer, have to decide on how to organize the course and there are many concepts. We discuss here only some possible implementations. In order to prepare the field let us first give a brief overview on the features available in .

The lecturer's contents area

This is the classical part of e-lectures. It allows the lecturer to set up course material in a structured way. The material may consist of individual html-files ("frames"), which may be arranged with links to at preceding and a subsequent frame. This sounds quite one-dimensional, but of course there may be many further links to internal or external URLs. The individual html-files are displayed in the main part of the course window. The files may thus be viewed as sections and subsections like in a traditional book, however with all the properties of hypertext.

Another approach would be to provide a web-like structure by connecting html- and other documents freely, without referring to the provided method of "internal links" and "last-next".

So all possibilities of html-documents are open. One may include images, movies, sound and other items. In case you include links to files, which are not representable by a standard browser, you should instruct your students how to download and install the necessary browser-plugins, external viewers or other applications.

The lecturer's contents area provides the basic material for the course in the sense of a living text book. Unless forbidden by the lecturer, all logged-in students may add public notes to each one of theses text frames.

Extra features available from the contents html-files are exercises. They are prepared again as html-files, where a few new commands organize the question-answer scenario. An "exercise" has a text part, a question part and an answer part. It is up to the lecturer, how this is used. One way is to suggest multiple-choice "questions", where the question part really is a list of alternative answers. Another way is to ask open questions and leave it to the student to answer or to find out the answer before or after clicking the button. The exercises have the task of self-examination and there is no grading rule built into the system right now.

The meeting place

This is the communication and collaboration area. Organized by the course administrator the students may join working- and discussion groups. In a "Post Office" they may send mail to the group fellows. The mailing addresses used are standard e-mail addresses. Thus the handling of the mail may be done with the user's favorite browser. The "Post Office" just facilitates the address handling within the course.

There is a general "Discussion Forum" open for all course users. There main topical threads may be opened by everyone and subtopics, comments etc. may be added up to level depth 10. Only the course administrator may remove the postings.

For group collaboration there is a userspace "File Depot". It is accessed in a filebrowser-like fashion and allows the users to create individual (protected) folders, upload and download files (deposited by their group's peers), and to publish certain files to be available for all course users. This is in particular apt for group-projects.

There is a (for users of the course) public chatroom "Cafe". It is a simple version and there exist many more sophisticated chatroom-clients publicly available. Try this version and if it is not convenient enough, link from your course pages to some other chatroom in the public domain.

Some features (like the whiteboard - it is little used in practice) we did not include for various reasons (among them manpower).

Extra menu items and the search feature

You may include special links in the main menu line. An example of such a button is provided by the "Man Page", which was used in a UNIX-course to allow the student a quick access to the UNIX-man-pages. This way such menu buttons may link to dedicated applications provided by the course author or third parties. Possible applications in science include visualization tools (e.g. for molecular modeling) or computer algebra interfaces.

Finally, unless opted out, the search field allows all users to search for occurrences of strings in parts of the contents area, as defined by the course administrator.

Scenarios to run your course

Based on these tools you may decide for very different ways to support your course

Mainly contents

Use mainly as an open distribution platform for course material. In this case you may switch off user login completely and allow access to everyone, like for a homepage. The users then will not have to log in, but they also cannot add notes to the course items. Also the Meeting Place should be disabled in that case.

User login + Contents

Users have to login for access to the course pages (only a few administrative or introductory pages are generally open) and the can also add publicly readable notes to all frames. The course admin has the possibility to check on the user activities via the user statistics tools in the admin area.

User login + Contents + Meeting Place

The lecturer organizes the students in groups of e.g. 3-5 persons each. Each group is assigned to a group home folder in the userspace area. Each user may also add comments to the discussion forum.

Mainly Meeting Place

Cooperative learning may be the objective for this solution. Use the interaction features for communication with and among the students, organized in groups. Material still may be placed into the contents part, but otherwise it just serves as the entrance point to the course.

Depending on your demands, intermediate versions are possible. You may switch off only the discussion forum, or the file depot, or the possibility to comment on the main frames etc. etc.