Organizing a Course Home Page
by
Ramón
V. León
University of
Tennessee
Many teachers have found it useful to support their classroom
instruction with a course home page. This can be seen from the many such
home pages found at the World
Lecture Hall . For example, a course home page can be used to keep students
informed of homework and exams and to distribute handouts and computer files
such as spread sheets. The home page of the course "Statistical
Reliability" taught by the author illustrates these and many other
applications of a course home page. In this short article we give suggestions
for organizing the files of a course home page. We assume that the reader
has a very elementary knowledge of home page authoring.
The main reasons one must think of the file organization
of a course home page are:
- to be able to easily update the course home page from
course offering to course offering
- to be able to easily use an WYSIWYG html authoring tools
such as Adobe PageMill 2.0.
- to be able to easily convert word processing document
into parts of the course home page using tools such as Microsoft's Word
Internet Assistant add-on
The figure at the right shows the file organization
that the author recommends for the parent directory (folder) of a course
home page. At the highest level one finds for folders class, information,
overview, and projects. The class folder contain the material
intended for the students to follow as they take the course. The information
folder contains information, such as the class syllabus, on how the
course is going to be managed. The overview folder contains information
on the subject of the course intended for the students to use in deciding
whether the subject of the course is of interest to them. Finally, the project
folder contains selected student projects. These four folders are linked
to the top level of the course home page under headings such as: Enter
the Classroom, Course Information and Policies, Overview of
Course Material, and Selected Student Projects.
To be able to easily update a course home page the main
idea is to keep material that changes from offering to offering separate
from material that will remain essentially the same from offering to offering.
Thus, the folder class has at its top level the folders: class
97, class96, datasets, exams, and handouts. The class96
and class97 folders contain material particular to a class offering
while material in the other folders can be reused from offering to offering.
For example, files in the class97 folder contain a class calendar,
class summaries with main points and study questions, and a homework log.
Clearly this material will change from one offering to the next. On the
other hand the folder handouts contains files of class material that
is offering independent. Similarly the folder exams which has
old exams and the folder datasets which has data sets to be used
to illustrate class points. The offering-dependent pages are linked as necessary
to the offering-independent pages.
To be able to easily use an WYSIWYG html
authoring tools such as Adobe PageMill 2.0 the key idea is to construct
every page containing pictures in a separate folder. For example, the figure
on the right shows the inside of one such folder for a page that contains
a handout with seven pictures. You can see this handout here.
In this case the pictures were screen shots taken with a utility such as
Flash-It for the Macintosh
or L-View Pro for Windows.
The text of the handout was written using Adobe PageMill in the file weibreg2.html.
When a picture was needed it was simply pasted in. Adobe PageMill was configured
to place the pictures as GIFs inside the folder numbering then sequentially.
To be able to easily convert word processing document into
parts of the course home page the key is to do the conversion into html
into a separate folder. For example, let's say that we have a handout written
in MS Word that contains a few pictures. We install the Internet Assistant
add-on to MS Word. Then we use the MS Word "Save As" command to
save the document in html format inside the folder. MS Word will place all
the pictures in the document inside the folder as GIFs.
In summary a well thought out directory (folder) organization
is the key to creating a course home page that can be easily updated from
offering to offering. The folder organization can also save time when using
tools such as Adobe PageMill and the MS Word Internet Assistant add-on.