[LON-CAPA-cvs] cvs: loncom /html/adm/help/tex Course_Requests.tex

[raeburn]

raeburn		Tue May 17 03:30:08 2011 EDT

  Added files:                 
    /loncom/html/adm/help/tex	Course_Requests.tex 
  Log:
  - Documentation for contextual help on page 1 of Course/Community requests.
  - Explanation of differences between official courses, unofficial courses
    and communities.
  
  

Index: loncom/html/adm/help/tex/Course_Requests.tex
+++ loncom/html/adm/help/tex/Course_Requests.tex
\label{Course_Requests}
Depending on your affiliation at your own institution (e.g., Faculty, Staff or Student) you may have received rights to request creation of courses and/or communities in your domain.  You might also been granted rights to request creation of courses in another domain.

The Course/Community requests utility is a multi-page web form which allows you to submit new requests, s well as view, modify or cancel pending requests, currently queued awaiting administrative action.

There are three types of course container which may be requested, although you might only have rights to request a subset of these.  The types are:

\begin{enumerate}
\item
\textbf{Official courses} are ones for which an institutional code has been defined, typically for the purpose of supporting automated enrollment of registered students.  Official courses may have been categorized by your institution for example by Year, Semeter, and Department.  Your selections for these categories on the second page of the request form will define the corresponding institutional code.

\item
\textbf{Unofficial courses} are ones for which there is no institutional code, but which otherwise are no different to official courses.  The resources included in such courses, once created, can include both items uploaded directly to a course, and also items imported from the cross-institutional repository of shared resources.  That repository is available to you if your LON-CAPA installation is part of the LON-CAPA cluster. 

\item
\textbf{Communities} are intended to provide collaborative spaces for groups of users to interact and share materials.  The same set of tools that are available in a regular course are available in a Community. One difference is that resources in the cross-instutional repository are not in general available for incorporation into a Community.  An exception to this is made for resources authored or co-authored by community coordinators, and which have been added to the shared resource pool.
\end{enumerate}

Depending on the type of course being created, and corresponding settings in the domain, you will be prompted to choose access dates, course personnel etc., and whether your new course should be cloned from an existing course for which you have cloning rights.   Communities may be cloned from existing communities, but not from existing courses.

A review page will be displayed summarizing the choices you have made, before you submit your course request for processing.  Your Course/Community request may be set to be processed automatically, queued for approval by a Domain Coordinator, or (for official courses) validated against institutional instructor of record data. LON-CAPA messages are sent to course requestors when a queued course is approved, or an official course which had been queued pending validation of instructor status, is created when validation occurs.