Physics Course Directory Hierarchy

Directory Hierarchy for Physics Courses

In an attempt to facilitate the use of computing resources to further the academic goals of the department, the department is making available disk space to the faculty teaching courses in the department. The space is provided by the department upon request, with a reasonable quota (negotiable if special circumstances warrant). The space is intended to meet the following requirements that various courses in the department were finding needed:

1. Give the faculty and TA's a place to put information, etc. related to the course on the web.
2. Give the faculty and TA's for the course a place to put materials that they wish to distribute electronically to the class, but should not be available to the internet community at large. This may be useful for copyrighted materials which can be shared with the class under acceptable use guidelines but which should not be shared with the world at large and thus should not be put on unprotected web pages. It may also be useful for files formats which are not readily shared over the web.
3. Provide a reasonably secure and reliable means for the students to submit course work electronically to the faculty and/or TA's if the faculty so desire.
4. Provide a reasonably secure and reliable means for the TA's or faculty to electronically return graded work to the students.
5. Provide a shared filespace where faculty and TA's can collaborate on course related projects without impacting either personal or groupspace quotas.

The primary concerns relating to the above is where is this space, how does one use it, and how is access controlled. The space is located on the PNCE-Unix cluster, and basically will be accessible from any Glue'd machine on campus. The directory for a class Physnnn will be located at /dept/phys/courses/Physnnn. Access to that directory and its subdirectories is controlled by PNCE-Unix/Glue accounts and the membership in one of three groups:

• a manager group which should contain all the faculty teaching the particular course. This group has the ability to modify the membership of the other groups for this course.
• a TA group, which should contain the teaching assistants for the course. This group will have privileged read and write access (like the manager group), but cannot modify the membership of the other groups.
• a class group, which should contain the PNCE-Unix/Glue accounts of all the students in the class. The class group has some access to the directory tree, but at a rather restricted level appropriate for students in the class.

Faculty and TAs wishing to use this system will need PNCE-Unix/Glue accounts, as will every student in the course for some of the features like electronic course work submission. Undergraduates and graduate students not in the department (whether taking the class or TA's) are encouraged to attempt to obtain their accounts from their own department or OIT if possible, although the physics department will give them an account if there are problems. Physics graduate students and faculty can obtain an account through the physics department if they do not already have such. Again, any Glue account will suffice, but WAM accounts will not work.

To start a course directory for a course you are teaching, submit a physhelp. Or if the directory for the course already exists from a previous semester and you as a faculty member wish to become a manager for that directory, you can alternatively request such from the chair's office, which can add you to the manager's group for that course with the command manage_class_managers physnnn where physnnn is the name of the course in question. Once you are a manager of a course, you can add or delete TA's and students from the TA and student groups using the commands manage_class_tas physnnn and manage_class_students physnnn, respectively. The procedures for using the above commands to maintain proper membership of the groups is detailed here.

NOTE: At this time, the framework does not support regulating access at any level finer than the course. I.e., no section level access control is available. For those courses with multiple sections in which different faculty and/or TA's are controlling the different sections, please show some courtesy to your colleagues teaching the other sections and do not take actions which would adversely affect them. For example, do not delete students from the class group just because they are not in your section if they might be in one of the other sections. It is advised that in such cases that the faculty and TA's make subdirectories underneath the standard directories (described below) for each section, or each professor, etc.

The following standard directories exist underneath the main /dept/phys/courses/Physnnn directory:

• public_html: This space is available for publishing pages to the web. Note that you may need to request it be properly linked to the departmental course page indices before first using, so check it before using the first time. Use physhelp to request a link be made to it.
• private: This space is only readable by the faculty and TA's for the course, who also have write access to it. It is NOT readable by the students. It is intended to provide a place where TA's and faculty and store private course related material, work on graded electronic documents, or share files among themselves without students being able to access anything.
• submissions: This directory is set up so that students can securely submit work. Students can see the name and sizes of submitted files, but cannot read any submitted files (even if it was their submission). It is suggested that you set up directories to organize the submissions beneath this directory. See document on electronic submissions for more information.
• returned_work: This directory is set up so that faculty and TA's can return work to the student securely. This directory should contain subdirectories consisting of the usernames of all students in the course. Graded work can be placed into those subdirectories by TA or faculty, and only the student whose username the directory was named after can read the file. The subdirectories for each student need to be created by the faculty member; this can be done automatically by running the command create_class_return_directories physnnn after the class group is populated. (It can be safely rerun after that, and should be rerun whenever someone is added to the class group). See document on electronic submissions for more information.

Also note that in addition to the directories listed above, the faculty and TA's can create and write to other directories underneath the main /dept/phys/Physnn directory in which to put any files they want to share with the class but not with the world. These files will only be readable to users in the class group. (Note: Any subdirectories made in the directories private, public_html, or submissions will retain the special access restrictions of the parent directory as described above. The ability to share files with the class is only granted to new directories created directly underneath the main course directory, and subdirectories of such.)

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