How To Maintain Course Websites
Contents
Course Instructor's Responsibilities
As the course instructor, you are responsible for maintaining the official course website. Your minimum responsibility is to ensure that the index.html for the official course website contains sufficient information to direct students to the web-based repository for course information. Certainly, you are welcomed and encouraged to use the official course website as the web-based repository for course information, but you could equally use UBC's WebCT service or your personal web site. In either of the latter two cases, since these are not the official course website, you are required to provide instructions on the official course website informing students on how to reach this course information.
Motivation
The primary motivation for this requirement is this: there must be a consistent and logical mechanism for students to reach web-based repositories for course information. This mechanism is the official course websites available via URLs of the form http://courses.ece.ubc.ca/XXX where XXX is the course number.
Accounts and Websites
Associated with every EECE course is a 'course account' on the departmental computing infrastructure. For example, associated with the course 'EECE XXX' is the course account 'eeceXXX'.
From the web server's perspective, a course account is no different than a personal account: the URL http://courses.ece.ubc.ca/XXX references the etc/www/ directory in account eeceXXX's home directory.
Detailed Instructions for Course Instructors
Gain access to the course account
During the transition between terms, send an email to help@ece.ubc.ca indicating that you are the instructor assigned to a course for the upcoming term. We will change the password for the associated course account to be the same as your personal account.
If the course is currently being taught by another instructor, please wait until after the final exam to request the transfer of control.
Clean the course account
At this point, you are the owner of the course account and it is your responsibility to clean the account of previous, potentially obsolete, content. Be sure to clean files both in the home directory of the account (e.g., ~eeceXXX/) and in the web site directory of the account (e.g., ~eeceXXX/etc/www/).
Publish web content to the official course website
Follow the instructions at How To Publish Personal Web Content to publish web content for the official course website. Be sure to log in using the course account and NOT your personal account.
If you do not intend to provide a web-based repository for your course, then you must create, at a minimum, an index.html file providing the course syllabus.
If you intend to use another web service to host the web-based repository for your course, then you must create, at a minimum, an index.html file providing a link to this other web service. Examples of alternate web services might be UBC's WebCT service or your personal web site.
If you intend to use the official course website as the web-based repository for your course, then, in addition to index.html, you may wish to create a 'private' subdirectory from where you could distribute content in a secure manner. Please follow the instructions at How To Password Protect Personal Web Content to do this.
