This webpage is a repository for provisional CodeLab documentation of the faculty interface (pending creation of a better vehicle). We will keep a list of links to topics at the top of this page, in reverse order of entry, and show the date of entry.

Topics:

[2006/01/05] Self-Service: Adding Instructor/TA accts, editing section identification information, exercise statistics

[2006/01/02] Setting Deadlines

[2006/01/02] Opening Course Manager (lets you set deadlines, rearrange the course, etc.)

[2006/01/02] Screen Dimensions (letting CodeLab make the best use of your screen)

[2006/01/01] Alternate uniform IDs (getting school IDs or school email addresses into your roster)

[2006/01/01] Font display issues with Debian Linux (description plus work-around)

Instructor Self-Service[return to top]

There is a growing number of administrative functions that instructors can do themselves, without contacting Turing's Craft Customer Support. (Not that we don't love to hear from you, but even with our generally fast response, you can still get things done faster if you do them yourself!)

To do this, log in to CodeLab and load the course in question. Then click on the Customer Support link in the upper right corner. Scroll down until you see "Fast Self-Service for Instructors:". At this point there are three options:

  1. Change Basic Section Information: allows you to enter or edit information that identifies your section (course title, department, section number, meeting times, etc.). It also allows you to specify alternateIDs (see elsewhere in this document).
  2. Section Exercise Statistics: display student submission data about each exercise in the section
  3. Add Additional Instructor (e.g. TA) Accounts

Setting Deadlines[return to top]

CourseManager mode allows the instructor to change deadlines and solution-viewable dates. First you must enter CourseManager mode (see elsewhere in this document). Then:

  1. mouse over the two vertical lines just to the right of the Table of Contents and when the cursor changes form click down and drag to the right-- this will reveal the dates
  2. click on any of the dates next to the topic you wish to modify -- a date control popup will result.
  3. make the changes to the various dates in the control, apply the changes and close the control window (if it doesn't close itself)
  4. click the "save" button to save the changes in the course

Opening Course Manager[return to top]

Course Manager Mode allows the instructor to change deadlines, change solution viewable dates, rearrange course material, disable exercises, etc. To open up the Course Manager, make sure you're in the LAB tab and look at the upper left corner of the Table Of Contents. Just above the table you should see a reddish-brown padlock icon. If you click it, it should "unlock" and a bunch of small green buttons will appear above the table of contents. The Course Manager has now been opened.

It will also probably be convenient at this point to expand the table of contents area to the right:

  1. find the pair of thin vertical lines next to the scrollbar of the table of contents.
  2. click on or between these vertical lines and hold and drag to the right to expand.

You can then drag around topics and exercises, rename topics,

You can close the Course Manager by clicking the reddish-brown padlock icon again.

Screen Dimensions[return to top]

By default, CodeLab assumes that the user screen is of the traditionally small resolution: 800x600. Most screens now are considerably bigger, and users, particularly faculty, would do well to change their CodeLab screen size preferences. There are two screen dimension preference: width and height (no surprise there). Each can be set to an absolute number OR can be set to automatically be the screen dimension. (Note that this is the screen, not the window dimension.)

This can accomplished by clicking PREFERENCES, and scrolling down if necessary to the "Screeen Size Preferences" in the lower left. After making your changes, click SAVE to make sure that your preferences are saved.

A good initial choice, if you have a 1024x768 screen (typical laptop for example) is to set the vertical to automatically assume the full screen height and set the horizontal to somewhere between 900 and 1000. You can always fine tune these to your liking later. (Do note that setting the vertical this way means you'd be well-advised to make the vertical size of your actual CodeLab window to be maxed out.)

Alternate Uniform IDs [return to top]

CodeLab IDs, as you know, are email addresses that students provide at registration time. It is important that these IDs be genuine email addresses for the students because some CodeLab features depend on that. However, these addresses and even the student names are not always convenient for faculty when using the roster facility.

Therefore, we have now introduced a mechanism to support uniform alternate IDs. For example, if you are at State U., you can force all your students to provide their imastudent@stateu.edu email address (in addition to their regular CodeLab ID). There are three parts to this:

Here are the details:

  1. Requiring An ID. To require an ID of each student, the instructor must:
    1. click customer service
    2. click "Change Basic Section Information"
    3. fill in the textfields:
      • alternate ID Regular Expression
      • alternate ID Descriptor
      The first of these is a Perl-form regular expression that specifies what constitutes a valid ID. Examples:
      • ..*@.*virgina.edu
      • [0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]
      which would admit (respectively) email addresses ending in "virginia.edu" and 5 digit IDs.
      The second, (the Descriptor) is a piece of text displayed to the student that should describe the form of their required ID.
    4. click save
  2. Once an instructor has specified a required alternate ID, every time a student logs in, he/she will be reminded to set this ID using PREFERENCES. The system will reject IDs that don't match the R.E. specified by the instructor. (Once an ID has been set, the student does not get the reminder.) (Note: instructors also have to set an ID for their own acct.)
  3. Mailed rosters have an additional column with the alternate ID. The graphic display of the roster within CodeLab now has a selection box where the instructor can have the roster display be name, by email-address (CodeLab ID) or by Alternate ID.

The Debian Font Issue [return to top]

There is a "known problem" with Flash and Debian Linux. The Debian folks apparently are rather passionate and purist about being an open source distribution and therefore their package manager is particularly sensitive to "non-free" (in the gnu sense) software. This complicates installation of things like the Microsoft TrueType fonts.

We have replicated this problem on a Debian 3.1 system and have successfully tested the following work-around:

Codelab uses MS True Type fonts that will need to be manually installed on Debian. You will need to install the MS TrueType Core Package and then make some modifications to your XF86Config-4 file.

  1. You'll need to make sure that you have 'contrib' available to you in one of your repositories. This is not the default configuration in Debian. To accomplish this:
  2. Now get the MS TrueType Core Package:
    apt-get install msttcorefonts
    or
    aptitude install msttcorefonts
    This will download all the fonts and all dependencies, including the package:
    x-ttcidfont-conf
  3. You will need to run:
    dpkg-reconfigure x-ttcid-font-conf
    You will be prompted about changes you will need to make to your configuration files. The following steps are a reiteration of that prompt.
    You will also get be prompted about how you want to handle the truetype fonts. Your choice will be between freetype and xtt. Unless you have already explicitly changed your configuration to use xtt, you should select "freetype".
  4. Edit:
    /etc/X11/XF86-Config-4
    To the "Files" section add the following two lines:
    /var/lib/defoma/x-ttcidfont-conf.d/dirs/TrueType
    /var/lib/defoma/x-ttcidfont-conf.d/dirs/CID
  5. Edit:
    /etc/X11/fs/config
    AND/OR
    /etc/X11-fs-xtt/config
    To the catalog variable (after the comment: #paths to search for fonts) remove any reference to:
    /usr/lib/X11/fonts/CID
    Add:
    /var/lib/defoma/x-ttcidfont-conf.d/dirs/TrueType
    /var/lib/defoma/x-ttcidfont-conf.d/dirs/CID
  6. You're done setting up. Now restart X. (full reboot just to be safe).