Course Web Pages
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Recommended practices for
Course Web Pages |
The World Wide Web can be a good way to distribute course-related information, such as syllabi, homework assignments, and homework solutions. In this document, LTS recommends practices for organizing and administering course-related web pages.
This document addresses the following questions:
Information Resources offers these recommendations to suggest a uniform organization for course web pages. If all course web pages were organized in this manner, students and faculty would know where to look for a given course web page without having to ask the instructor.
Following are steps for carrying out the recommendations listed above.
A form must be filled out and signed. This form can be found in the Information Resources Client Services office (8-3990), or can be found online.
The form gives a choice for the name of the account. Again, our recommendation is that a department named dept (that is, a department whose abbreviation in course listings is dept) use an account with the name indept.
Naturally, if your account is already open, you need not do this.
If the web document directory www-data already exists, you need not do this.
Log into http://www.lehigh.edu/account using your departmental account, and click on the option W3Setup. You will be asked to enter the account password again, and then the script will post its results to the top of the page.
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Creating/checking web directory ... |
Log into one of the Compute Servers using your departmental account and run the command courseweb adddir directory, where directory specifies the directory to be created for the course. (This command can also be run from a shell prompt on the Network Server.)
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After logging in as indept:
CS4:/home/indept>courseweb adddir dept001 |
If the directory already exists, courseweb will not overwrite it, but it will change permissions to make the directory secure. courseweb also plays some other tricks which are mentioned in the printout above, and are described later in this document.
Log into one of the Compute Servers using your departmental account. To give an instructor write access to a course directory, use the command courseweb adduser user directory
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After logging in as indept:
CS4:/home/indept>courseweb adduser abc0 dept001 |
To list who has access to a course directory, use the command courseweb showusers directory
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After logging in as indept:
CS4:/home/indept>courseweb showusers dept001 |
To take away an instructor's write access to the course directory, remove the instructor from the group using the command courseweb removeuser user directory
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After logging in:
CS4:/home/indept>courseweb removeuser abc0 dept001 |
Other options are available with the courseweb command. Usage information is provided if the courseweb command is run without options specified. Back to top
You may want to restrict access to certain areas in your web page, to Lehigh computers, to valid Lehigh Users (ones with valid Lehigh IDs and passwords), or by using class passwords. To do this, see the instructions in Technical Bulletin 15: Restricted Access....
Create a file called .htaccess in the directory you wish to limit. In that file should be the following code:
<Limit GET>
order deny,allow
deny from all
allow from 128.180
</Limit>
Create a file called .htaccess in the directory you wish to limit. In that file, put the following code:
<Limit GET>
order deny,allow
deny from all
AuthExternal afs
AuthName AFSauthentication
AuthType Basic
require valid-user
</Limit>
Students will be prompted for their AFS (Network Server) ID and password to get access. (Note: this cannot be used to limit access to specific students.)
Create a file called .htaccess in the directory you wish to limit. In that file, put the following code:
<Limit GET>
order deny,allow
deny from all
allow from 128.180
AuthExternal afs
AuthName AFSauthentication
AuthType Basic
require valid-user
satisfy all
</Limit>
To provide interactive discussion and/or online announcements within your web site, you can link to a discussion conference or moderated bulletin board on the Lehigh Server.
To request that such a conference be set up for your class, contact Client Services (x3990) for the appropriate form. Once your class has been created, it can be reached on the web (and linked to) using the LUNA web interface: http://luna.cc.lehigh.edu:80/INFO or http://luna.cc.lehigh.edu:81/INFO
The difference between the http://luna.cc.lehigh.edu:80/INFO and the http://luna.cc.lehigh.edu:81/INFO servers is that on 80, the user is not asked for id and password, and so cannot post to the forums. However, on 81, the user is asked for a Lehigh ID and password and CAN post to the forums.
To link directly to your discussion group, you probably want to provide
access to http://luna.cc.lehigh.edu:81/YOURBOARD
where YOURBOARD is the name assigned to your
conference or bulletin board.
Note: the contents of your bulletin board or course discussion will be available on the web unless you specifically request that the discussion be limited to certain users.