Course settings¶
- Main questions:
How to alter the course menu on the left, set deadlines and add course staff?
- Topics?
Course settings in A+
- What you are supposed to do?
If you have already installed aplus-manual, these features should work just ok.
- Difficulty:
Easy.
- Laboriousness:
Half an hour.
The course settings page in A+¶
A+ has a Course settings page which is only visible to the teacher. Log in
with an account having teacher privileges. If you want to test this with
aplus-manual, this is the username root and password root. Next click
the Edit course link from the menu on the left as shown in the picture
below.
The course settings page has several tabs.
Instances alter the course instances. This is described in the earlier chapter.
The Course tab allows editing the course details.
The Teachers tab allows adding and removing teachers from the course.
The Index tab controls how the table of contents of the course is shown to the students.
The Content tab allows reorganising the course material and setting its availability.
The Menu tab allows adding new items to the course menu on the left.
The Tags tab allows tagging students for specific purposes.
The Deviations tab allows setting deadline deviations for individual students.
The Batch assess is left undocumented. It is related to the A+ API.
The Course tab¶
The Course tab allows editing the course details. The fields are in English and quite self-explanatory.
Visible to students: this checkbox allows hiding the course from students. This is useful when you are setting up a new instance of your course on a production server, but don't want the students to enroll and see the contents yet.
Instance name: this is shown in the list of current and old courses
(https://APLUSDOMAIN/archive) to distinguish different instances from
each other.
Url: this is the identifier of course instance in the A+ URL, for example,
in the URL https://plus.cs.hut.fi/a1141/2018/, the 2018/ part is the instance.
Image is the image showing on the A+ front page. See
Gallery of features for
an example. With a running copy of aplus-manual, try to set the course image
to file fireworks.jpg found in the subdirectory images of the manual.
Language is a two-alphabet country code in lowercase, such as en,
fi, or se.
Course content visibility and date settings¶
Students enroll to the course in A+. Enrollment is required for submitting solutions to exercises. Note that there is no integration to other university systems, such as WebOodi in Aalto University. In case of WebOodi, the student must both enroll to the course in WebOodi and to the course in A+.
Enrollment starting time and Enrollment ending time in the course settings indicate when the students can enroll to the course.
Starting time and Ending time define the starting and ending times for the course. They are also the default opening and closing times for course modules.
The times and dates have the format YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS, that is, year-month-day
hours-minutes-seconds in the 24-hour clock. For example, 2016-06-01 12:00:00
means 1st June 2016 Noon.
Enrollment starting and ending times do not need to be enclosed within the course starting and ending times. If the enrollment starting or ending times are not defined, the course starting and ending times are used as default values. Enrollment is possible between the enrollment starting and ending times for the enrollment audience: logged-in internal or external user (the target audience is configurable).
The Allow unofficial submissions setting in exercise categories enables students to submit solutions to exercises after the deadline, but those submissions are unofficial and their points are ignored. The submissions are stored in the database and the student may view the feedback.
Lifesupport time: after this, the model answers are not visible to students.
Archive time is used to prevent all exercise submissions after a certain time. This is relevant for unofficial submissions.
Chronologically, the times should be set as follows:
Course starting time < course ending time < lifesupport time < archive time
Module (exercise round) open and close times do not need to be enclosed within the course starting and ending times.
Bugs (fixed in the Autumn 2019 release)
Bug: Student may submit after the archive time if the module is still open.
Bug: Student can view the exercise model solution after the module deadline even if he has a personal deadline extension and may submit and gain points.
Bug: the module late submission close time may be earlier than the module close time, which makes no sense and also allows students to view the model solution while the module is normally open.
Student's access to course material over time¶
Before module open |
Module open |
After module close (no late sbms) |
After module close (enabled late sbms) |
After module late sbms close |
During personal deadline extension |
From course lifesupport to archive time |
After course archive time |
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Can view chapter |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Can view exercise |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Can submit to exercise |
No |
Yes |
No (1) |
Yes |
No (1) |
Yes |
Yes/No (2) |
No |
Can open model solution |
No |
No |
Yes |
No |
Yes |
No |
No |
No |
Can view his own old submissions |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
If the category has unofficial submissions enabled, the student may submit but no points will be gained.
Yes, may submit normally if the module is open. Unofficial submissions without points are allowed after the module deadline if the category has enabled unofficial submissions.
Course content visibility based on audience¶
Enrollment audience has three options.
Internal users means only internal students of the university may enroll.
External users means the course is MOOC only (users log in with Google accounts).
Internal and external users means both of the above groups can enroll.
The View content to setting of a course instance controls who may view the course content.
Alternatives:
Enrolled students: this is obvious.
Enrollment audience: this configured in the setting above.
All registered users: this is any logged-in user
Public to internet: anonymous user
Bug (fixed in the Autumn 2019 release)
When set to “enrolled students”, unenrolled logged-in users may still view course content chapters and exercises. They may not open their old submissions, the course materials page nor the course results page, but they see everything on the course front page anyway and they can open the chapters and exercises.
Head urls define external CSS and JavaScript resources that are included on all course pages.
Assistants is a list of course assistants. The assistants do not need to be
enrolled on the course. To add an assistant, enter their login in form
user@domain, for example, userid@aalto.fi or userid@gmail.com
(not firstname.lastname@aalto.fi).
Technical error emails. By default exercise errors are reported to teacher email addresses. Set this field as comma separated emails to override the recipients.
The difference between teachers and assistants is that assistants can view students' exercise submissions and grade them, but they cannot edit the course.
The Index tab¶
The Index tab controls how main page of the course is shown to the students.
Index mode has several options.
User results is an exercise-oriented view. It shows each course module (usually a weekly chapter) separately and inside them, the submodules. In addition to that, it lists all the exercises on the course, and student's submissions and highest scores for each exercise.
Table of contents shows the same information, but without exercises. Thus, it is more compact. This is the same view as the Course materials in the course menu.
Link to last visited content allows the student continue from the same content submodule they were viewing last time.
Description is a text shown on the main page of the course in top of the index. One can enter either plain text or HTML here.
Footer is similarly content shown after the index.