Faculty Information on Course Home Pages

Consider DoIT's WebCT web-based learning system as an alternative or complement to our course web pages.

Here are some guides on how to create a course home page on our system. Each instructor may own a directory for course-related materials for each course they teach. These directories are named by a combination of the course number and the instructor's login. For example, the directory /p/stat/course/st371-larget/ is owned by larget for his version of Statistics 371 material. Every semester we create links from course logins of the form stnnn-c, where nnn is the course number and c is the section number, to the corresponding course directory. For example when Bret Larget teaches lecture section 1 of Statistics 371 we create a login st371-1 with the home directory linked to /p/stat/course/st371-larget

If course web pages are created according to the instructions below they can be accessed as the easily-remembered

www.stat.wisc.edu/~st371-1

You can make course-related materials visible through the World Wide Web. As for your own course home page, you would create a subdirectory such as

/p/stat/course/st371-larget/public/html/

and put your HTML (HyperText Markup Language) documents in there. After that, your students can access the area as

www.stat.wisc.edu/~st371-1/

You may also want to create a private directory to protect your notes, homework and exams in preparation. This may already exist. If it does not, try the following:

% chdir ~st371-1/
% mkdir private
% chmod 700 private
% fs sa private system:anyuser none

The last two commands keep others out of this area.

In general the /p/stat/course/stxxx-yyyyyy directories (where xxx is the course number and yyyyyy is the instructor's login) will be retained from semester to semester. That way you don't have to keep recreating the files or storing duplicates somewhere. Every semester, we will create course "logins" for that semester in the form stxxx-y (where xxx is the course number and y is the lecture section number) and link them to the course-instructor combination.

If Course Directory web page shows up as FORBIDDEN
The user can set their file permissions.
Cd <dir>
Fs sa . system:anyuser <permissions>

Permissions needed
Need l (list) on course directory
Need rl (read/list) on public directory
Need rl (read/list on html directory

example:
cd stxxx-1
fs sa . system:anyuser l

If you would like to create a personal homepage on the Statistics Department web page, please see Personal Home Page Info.