By the Istec's Development Team
Electrical & Computer Engineering Department, University of New
Mexico.
Although the name of this manual is ``Administrator Manual'' it was not conceive as a detailed manual for the instalation, upgrade, or maintenance of the system, but as an introduction or How To for the person in charge to publish courses and maintain the front-end of the system. This means, the one that will be responsible for the publication of course and all tasks related to this activity. TelEduc Administrator Manual will guide you through basic course administration actions such as :
Some notation is used through this manual that you should be aware of. Each time we refer to a menu option or a link in the web interface we will use italics and whenever we will refer to a user name or a file name, we will used bold characters.
This manual is in development. If you find any typo or error we will be very grateful if you let us know.
ISTEC is a non-profit organization comprised of educational, research, and industrial institutions throughout the Americas and the Iberian Peninsula. The Consortium has been established to foster scientific, engineering, and technology education, joint international research and development efforts among its members, and to provide a cost-effective vehicle for the application and transfer of technology.
ChipsNsalsa educational portal enables the client to access a wide variety of knowledge sources. TelEduc system forms part of the ISTEC's ChipsNsalsa portal and allows you to create courses online for your internal consumption and distribution. You can also download courses and view them on your own.
The only requirement for the administrator is to have a web browser and a reliable connection to the Internet. TelEduc have been tested, and must work with Internet Explorer 5.0 or higher, Nestcape 4.78 or higher and Mozilla 1.0 or higher. So we recommend these browsers in order to avoid any possible issue related to compatibility.
To access the administrators tools go the section of Online Courses in portal.istec.org and follow the link to Administration. You will be asked for your user and password.
After the access is granted you will see the main tool interface, with links to each possible task of an administrator
All possible task can be classified in two main groups, course administration tasks (left) and system administration tasks (right). We will cover both, at chapter 3 and chapter 4 respectively.
Course creation link will result in a menu of the system with two options: Create a Course and Evaluate course creations request as is shown in figure 2.
Create a course will ask you for some basic information related to the new course as is shown in figure 3. You must provide the name of the course, the estimate number of students you are expecting to register and also information about the coordinator (instructor or/and TA) for this course, such as his/her full name, e-mail and login. This information will be used to send an email to the coordinator of the course with a notice of course creation and a user and password to access it in administrator mode.
Evaluate course creations is basically a reporting tool that will show you all the request the system has receive to create new course. This information can be used to keep tracking of the request, acceptance and rejection of new course creations.
As the number of courses in the portal becomes bigger, it would be necessary to classify them, in order to make them more accessible and easy to find and navigate. Edit Categories option will provide you with the capability of define, rename or delete course categories. These categories will be used as a classification tool for the courses in the portal.
This tool menu is to be used in conjunction with the Edit Categories menu of the previous section. Here you will be able to setup a category for each one of the courses registered in the portal as is shown in figure 5. Of course, you can also just let courses without a specific category. Not a problem!!
If for any reason you decide to eliminate or delete a course from the portal, you will need to use the Remove a Course Manual as is shown in figure 6. This operation will not delete the files. It will only put all the related files away, in a restricted area. The result is that no one will be able to access that course through the TelEduc environment. You can always recover those files, but for that you will need to used the need tool: Import a course.
This menu is the complement of Remove a Course menu. You will be able to import courses from the restricted area where they were put after you remove them from the TelEduc environment.
Once a course have finished you can order the TelEduc environment to reutilize the course. This means that you will be able to use the same structure and related files, but the information on the students, instructors, TAs will be renew by the environment to fits the new version of the course. Once you get to this menu a list of available course to reutilize will be shown.
This menu will allow you to broadcast e-mail messages to users, coordinators and instructors registered in the different courses of the environment. This could be very useful to communicate maintenance activities, upgrades, new courses, etc.
Change Login menu allows you to change login information for any of the courses registered in TelEduc environment. Just select the course in the first window (figure 10) and then select the user you want to setup in the next window (figure 11). This will produce a third window where you will be prompted for a new user login.
This menu will allow you to do direct SQL query on any of the environment databases.
Is this section you will generate reports on the courses registered in TelEduc environment. The first menu will allow you to select whatever you want to see information about the number of courses in the environment (figure 17), the number of students, instructors and TA's registered by course (figure 18), or information on the size and number of files per course (figure 19).
This is probably the most important tool for the environment administration. As shown in figure 24 you can select what ever you want to Select Standard Language of the environment (English, Spanish and Portuguese are allowed), Configure the Course Creation Procedure, Configure the Institution, Update List of TelEduc Managers, Change Administrator Data, Change Administrator Password, and Configure Access Address and Directory Structure. All of these menus are self explanatories, but some of them require comments in their functionality.
This option allows you to choose with whatever you want users to send you an e-mail in order to request a course creation or if they can fill out a form that will be eventually forwarded to you in order to create a course. Both options will finally produce an entry in the menu we review on Chapter 3, section 3.1. The menu is simply and is shown in figure 27.
In the case of Institution configuration, this only will ask basic information of the Institution using TelEduc environment, as shown in figure 28.
This is the managers menu administration. Basically you will be able to configure new course managers. The names you will provide here will be shown as options whenever you configure a manager or instructor for a course.
This is the main system configuration menu. You will need to supply very specific information about the server and the operating system configuration. So, if you are not God in your system... I mean...root, you will probably need to talk to your server administrator before using this menu. All options are shown in figure 32.
As you can see, you will need to supply information on the directory structure in your server. Better know what you are doing!!.
This document was generated using the LaTeX2HTML translator Version 2002-2-1 (1.70)
The command line arguments were:
latex2html -no_subdir -split 0 -show_section_numbers /tmp/lyx_tmpdir2845nvGYBw/lyx_tmpbuf0/AdministratorManualv1.tex
The translation was initiated by Alonzo Vera on 2003-06-11
You can also download a pdf version of this manual here
