Create courses

Normal, Template and Standalone Courses

Before we start the tour, you should know there are three types of Manhattan classrooms:

Most of the time, you will be creating "normal" courses. "Standalone" courses are useful to support non-academic activities like clubs or special courses with students who are not part of your normal population. You'll understand the value of "course templates" when you get to the point where you've got 100 teachers running 400 courses on your server, and no one wants you delete any courses from previous semesters because they contain too much valuable material!

Creating normal courses

In this section, you'll start by creating a Manhattan course "Introduction to Physics" taught by Albert Einstein. You'll then create an English Literature course for another professor.

PHY 101 01
Introduction to Physics
Spring 2003
Prof. Einstein
X34322   Albert Einstein
X343888  Neils Bohr
X347332  Isaac Newton
X394032  Michael Jordan
X334321  Steven Stanton
X394452  Cindy Slattery
X485734  Robert Frost

ENG 101 01
English Composition I
Spring 2003
Prof. Jenkins
X34321   Julius Jenkins
X343888  Neils Bohr
X347389  Robert Fuller
X394096  Thomas Edison
X334377  Richard Taylor
X394478  Marie Curie
X485753  Janet Jackson

Logging in as Prof. Einstein

Now visit:

http(s)://YOURSERVER.edu/manhat2-bin/doorstep

This is the login page used by students and teachers. Note the differences between the URL used for the administrator's login and that used by students and teachers:

Prof. Einstein's username and password are:

Username: ae4322
Password: ae4322

Manhattan derives a person's username by adding the last four digits of their ID number to their initials (see ID numbers, usernames and passwords for details). A person's password is initially the same as their username. They are forced to change their password the first time they log in.

Since this is the first time Prof. Einstein is logging in, you should be looking at the "Change your Password" page now.

Enter:

Enter your CURRENT PASSWORD: ae4322
Enter your NEW password: relativity
Enter your NEW password again: relativity

You should now see Prof. Einstein's "My Manhattan" page, which lists all of his courses. There's only one course there at the moment:

Click on the link to "PHY 101 01" to enter that course. The first time the teacher enters a newly created course, he's brought to a page that asks him to select the modules to be used in that course. Scroll down and enable all 13 of Manhattan's modules (you can select either of the two "Enable this module" checkboxes for modules that give you a choice) and click the Update Configuration button at the bottom of the form.

You should now be at the "Main Menu" for this course:

How to effectively use Manhattan as a teacher is well beyond the scope of this administrator's manual - look for the Manhattan 2.2 Teacher's Reference at http://manhattan.sourceforge.net. For now, click on the Configuration button. You'll get to a page listing things the teacher can do to administer this Manhattan classroom. Make a mental note of what the teacher can do using the commands on this menu. As you'll soon learn, as the system administrator, you can get to the exact same configuration menu for any course on the server.

If you'd like, you can spend time playing around with Prof. Einstein's Physics course. In particular, you might want to:

• Click on the View password file link, found on the Configuration menu for the course. Print out this list of students in the class. You can use this list to log in as students, if you wish. Remember that a person's initial password is the same as their username.

• If you want, you can try adding a few messages to the classroom.

• When you're done experimenting, click on the Exit Classroom button on the classroom's Main Menu. You'll get back to the "My Manhattan" page, which lists Albert Einstein's courses. Now click on the Log Out. If you are sent to Manhattan's Sourceforge site, you need to change the EXIT_URL setting in the custom.h file and do a make clean ; make english See Step 6.

When you're ready to learn more about the administrative system, move on to the next section.

Create a Course Template for Prof. Einstein

As described in Normal, Template and Standalone Courses, a "course template" is intended to be a place to permanently store course materials for re-use. We set up an active classroom for Prof. Einstein's "Introduction to Physics" course. As the semester progresses, he's likely to post content like the syllabus and lecture notes that he'll want to re-use for the next semester. As the system administrator, you will sooner or later be telling Prof. Einstein that you would like very much to delete his old Physics courses to make room on the server. By creating a course template for "Introduction to Physics", you'll be giving Prof. Einstein a safe place to put his lecture notes.

Log back into Manhattan's administration system as the super user. Again, the URL looks something like this:

http(s)://YOURSERVER.edu/manhat2-sbin/super_doorstep

Use your favorite text editor to create a new file with these lines:

PHY 101
Introduction to Physics
Course Templates
Prof. Einstein
X34322   Albert Einstein

(Again, the format of this file is detailed in More about the roster text file.) Now, click on the Create courses link on the administrator's page.

Open the drop-down list next to the "Group:" label, and note again that the group we created earlier named "try" is now on the list. (You'll see how to give this group a description later in this tutorial.) It turns out that since we are about to create a course template, it doesn't matter which group you select.

When creating a course template, Manhattan ignores the group you select on the "Create courses" form. Course templates are automatically placed in a special group for each teacher on the system.

Type phy101 into the "Internal Course Name" field. Click on the "Browse" button and find and open the text file you just saved on your PC. Be sure to select "Template" for the "Course type". After filling in the form, it should look like the image below. Of course, the path to the roster file will be different, depending on where you saved it on your PC.

Click the Create this course button to submit the form and create the course template. You should see something like the following:

Notice that Manhattan has automatically put the template into a group named Tae4322 (ae4322 is Albert Einstein's username), and that it has inserted an uppercase 'T' (for Template) in front of the "Internal Course Name" you specified on the form.

Now login as Prof. Einstein again, by visiting http(s)://YOURSERVER.edu/manhat2-bin/doorstep His username is: ae4322 If you followed this tutorial, his password is now: relativity You should see his course template listed in addition to his active Physics 101 course. Once Prof. Einstein learns how to use Manhattan's Copy and Paste commands, he can freely move course materials to and from his course template. Someday, as the system administrator you will delete the active Intro to Physics course with the students, but you'll promise the teachers they can keep their course templates "forever".

As we said before, the use of Manhattan from a teacher's perspective is covered in a separate manual, look for it at: http://manhattan.sourceforge.net Feel free to experiment all you wish with the sample courses you create in this tutorial. You'll be completely deleting all of the courses and users at the very end, leaving your installation fresh for your real courses.

Create a standalone course

Prof. Einstein assists students with a Physics club. The club is open not only to students in your school, but also to students, teachers, and parents associated with any school in your town. He'd like to use Manhattan as a way to keep club members informed of meetings.

A Manhattan "standalone course" is the best choice where there are students/teachers from outside of your school involved in the "classroom". As described in Normal, Template and Standalone Courses, the user information for standalone courses is completely separate from the central store of usernames/passwords on your server. This makes it possible for the teacher or system administrator to freely add students and other teachers using ficticious ID numbers, or even ficticious names if desired.

Since the username/password information is not centralized for a standalone course, a standalone course won't show up when a person logs into Manhattan in the normal way, that is, by visiting http(s)://YOURSERVER.edu/manhat2-bin/doorstep. Instead, they must visit a separate URL for each standalone course. Nevertheless, you'll find that the system administrator can manage standalone courses via the administrative program, much like normal and template courses.

To create a standalone course for the Physics Club, create a text file with the following lines:

Phy Club
The Physics Club
2003-2004
Albert Einstein
X34322  Albert Einstein
000001  John Bellows
000002  Michael Adams
000003  Sara Smith

The above roster text file includes Albert Einstein as the teacher of the class. We used his real ID number X34322 in the 5th line, the same one used to create his "normal" course and his "course template" earlier in this tutorial. We did this only to make his username for this standalone course the same as for his "centralized" courses, but we didn't have to. The other three people listed in the file are founding members of the club. Since they don't go to this school, we have no idea what their ID numbers are (since they aren't in our school's information system), nor do they have other Manhattan accounts. Therefore, we just invented their ID numbers. (We could have used, say, the last four digits of their phone number, or any other string of characters that contains at least one digit 0-9.)

Now login to the administrative system as super-user, click the Create courses link, and fill in the form as follows:

• Select "<New Group>" and type clubs as the name of the new group.

• Use physics as the "Internal Course Name" of the course.

• Click Browse to open the "Roster file" you just created on your PC

• Be sure to select Standalone as the "Course type"

As usual, the location and name of the "Roster file" will vary according to what you called the file and where you saved it on your PC. After clicking the Create this course button, the standalone course will be created and you'll get a page like this:

Although we created a new group named clubs to hold this standalone course, we could have stored the course in the existing course group named try. "Normal" and "standalone" courses can be intermixed within a course group.

Now login as Prof. Einstein again, by visiting http(s)://YOURSERVER.edu/manhat2-bin/doorstep His username is: ae4322 If you followed this tutorial exactly, his password is: relativity. You will not see the standalone Physics Club classroom you just created! As we said, standalone courses, well, "stand alone". Standalone courses always have their own URL which takes the form:

http(s)://YOURSERVER.edu/manhat2-bin/doorstep?class=GROUP/INTERNAL_COURSE_NAME

where GROUP is the name of the "course group" named when the course was created, and INTERNAL_COURSE_NAME is the "internal course name" given to the course when it was created. Generally the system administrator, i.e. you, will maintain a list of links to standalone courses at a web site. (A link to the Physics Club standalone course would look nice on the Physics Club website, wouldn't it?) As a specific example, to login to the Physics Club classroom, visit:

http(s)://YOURSERVER.edu/manhat2-bin/doorstep?class=clubs/physics

This is the first time Prof. Einstein is logging in to this standalone course, so his password is the same as his username: ae4322. After logging in for the first time, you'll be forced to select another password. While you might change Prof. Einstein's password to relativity to keep it the same as his other courses, keep in mind that the password for this standalone course is entirely independent from the password for his centralized courses. A person could have a different password for each of their standalone courses.