Table of Contents
This course website contains thousands of web pages. It can be a bit daunting when you are starting out. This document explains the basic organization of the site.
When you first enter the course site, you are taken to one of several directory pages, easily recognized by the row of buttons down the left side. The directory pages serve as gateways to the various documents that make up this web site.
You will start at the page, where you will find announcements from the instructor and a list of the most recent posting in the course Forum.
You will usually head next to the page, where you will find the outline of the course subject matter together with textbook readings, assignments, lecture notes or slides, etc.
If you are a newcomer to the course, you should probably begin by checking out the documents in the page. (In fact, you should probably do that right after completing this document.) Here you will find the course syllabus and other documents relating to course policies and procedures and on how to get started working in the course. There may be links to many of these documents elsewhere in the course, but the page collects them all together into one
The page contains links to a variety of reference materials and software packages that may prove useful to you in this course.
The page contains a list of frequently asked questions about the course policies and content, the C++ programming language, etc.
This may not be an exhaustive list of the directory pages. Feel free to poke around the directory, getting yourself familiar with the overall structure of the website.
At the bottom of nearly every page you will find these buttons:
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This takes you back to the page. |
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This opens up a window from which you can open new discussions in the Forum with your entire class or restricted to the instructor and TAs of the course. The email will already contain the name of the course and the location of the page on which you clicked that button. This is the preferred way for you to ask questions or comment on the course materials. You are strongly encouraged to use this rather than to simply fire up your email program and write directly to the instructor. If you have a question about an assignment, use the button at the bottom of the assignment page. If you have a question about some code appearing on a page of lecture notes, use the button at that bottom of the page containing that code, and so on. After all, you want me to respond quickly and accurately to your message. Experience has shown that students tend, however, to omit important context info (such as what course they are in, which assignment they are working on, etc.). An instructor may be teaching several different courses in a semester. If some of these are web-courses, the instructor may have students progressing through the course at different rates, So if you send the instructor a message that omits this kind of context information, one of two things is likely to happen:
So it's really in your own best interest to streamline the communication process as much as possible. And, while we're on the subject, you might want to think about how to phrase your question or comment to get the quickest and most accurate response. |
Some of the documents in this course are multi-page documents, consisting of a number of separate web pages arranged much like the pages of a book. For example, try clicking here for the multi-page version of this document.
Looking across the top and bottom of a multi-page document, you will see a set of icons for moving through the pages.
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This moves you to the next page in a multi-page document. (If you are already on the last page, this icon will not appear.) |
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This moves you to the previous page in a multi-page document. (If you are already on the first page, this icon will not appear.) |
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In documents with a hierarchical structure (e.g., subsections inside sections inside chapters), this moves you up one level in the hierarchy. |
Most multi-page documents will also display, at the bottom of the page:
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This takes you to a printable version of the same document, either the entire document in a single HTML page or a PDF version. |
One of the more important features of this course website is its discussion forum. There you will find a number of "discussion threads" in which different people write about upon issues that arise during the course. A thread may begin with a question about what something in a course document means or about how to do something in the course. Or it may begin as a comment by someone about an interesting related fact or software package. Other people may then reply, continuing on until the natural course of the discussion eventually winds to a halt.
Now, it's hardly unusual for a website to feature a forum (also known as bulletin boards or discussion groups). What is unusual about this one is that the Forum is integrated with the course documents. Nearly every web page in the course has a "Discuss This Page" section at the bottom, which lists any discussion threads already created about that page. It also offers a button allowing you to open up new discussions about the thread.
As you read through most documents, you will see that some have discussion threads listed at the buttom. For example, you should see a "Welcome to the Forum" thread listed at the buttom of this page. (If not, try going to the multi-page version of this document.) Clicking on the thread title will take you to that discussion. Try it now, and read up on how to add your own replies to an existing discussion thread.
Reading through a document with existing discussion threads is the electronic equivalent of sitting in a lecture and having one of your classmates raise their hand to ask a question. In many cases, that question and its answer may help you learn more about the topic under discussion. In some cases, you may know the answer and be able to supply it. You are encouraged to do so, so that you and your classmates together are able to get prompt answers to any questions you may have.
What if you have a new question or comment of your own? In a conventional lecture, you would raise your hand and, when recognized, speak to the class. The electronic equivalent, when you are reading a document in this website, is to create a new discussion thread attached to that document. To do this, click on the "New Discussion Thread" button at the bottom of the page. You will be taken to a page where you can create a new thread of your own.
If you like, go ahead and try opening up a new discussion thread targeted at this page.
Part of the art of asking good questions or of initiating a good discussion is to pick the right document. If the question or comment comes to mind because of something you are reading, the choice is obvious. If a question occurs to you at other times, however, give a little time and thought to the appropriate document. For example, if you have a question about a programming assignment, go to the page describing that assignment and ask it there. If you have a question about course policies and procedures, you should probably seek out the appropriate section of the course syllabus and attach your question there.
Please do not get lazy and simply attach your thread to the Announcements or Topics page simply because this was the first page you came to. Over the course of the semester, anywhere from dozens to hundreds of your fellow students will visit those pages. If they try to read discussions that are not actually relevant to that part of the site, then you have wasted their time, and you may wind up sowing confusion and mis-information. It also reduces your chances of getting a useful response, because those of your fellow students who are working on the same part of the course won't see your post there and because I may have to guess what you are actually talking about.
When you create a thread, you have the option of marking it as "Public" or "Private". A public thread can be read by everyone enrolled in the course. A private thread can be read only by the person who created the thread and by the course instructors. In general, any thread in which you discuss all or part of your solution to an assignment, even if you are only speculating on possible solutions, should be marked as private. Questions about a specific grade that you received should be private. Everything else should probably be public.
The course instructors may, if they feel it appropriate, change private threads to public and vice-versa. They may alter or edit your posts to remove content that they feel should not appear in a public thread (e.g., code for solving part of an assignment).
In general, the Forum should be your primary means of asking questions in this course. Although you have been provided in the course syllabus with an email address to contact the instructor, email should generally be used only for questions that can't, by their nature, be asked in the Forum (the website is down, your password doesn't work, etc.) or for which you can't find an appropriate document related to the question.
If you send e-mail to the instructor that should, in the instructor's opinion, have been posted to the Forum, the instructor may copy your e-mail into the Forum and reply there. Or the instructor may simply send you a message reminding you that you should have used the Forum.
Conversely, if you post something in the Forum that the instructor feels is inappropriate, the instructor may remove your post and reply, if necessary, via email.
The Forum is an official part of this course.
Students posting in the Forum are expected to conform to the norms for civility and respect for ones' classmates and instructors that are common to all on-campus speech and writing.
Students are also expected to conform to the norms of "netiquette", for example, RFC 1855: Netiquette Guidelines. In particular:
Emotions are often hard to convey and easy to misunderstand in written text. Smileys and other indicators can help (but don't assume that attaching a :-) to an insult will make everything OK with the people reading your post.).
DON'T POST IN ALL CAPITALS or in all bold or, even worse, IN ALL BOLD CAPITALS. This is considered to be shouting, and most people don't like to be shouted at, whether in real life or on-line.
"Shooting the messenger" is seldom a good idea. In general, assume that people who take the time to reply to your posts are honestly trying to help. Getting mad at them and "flaming" back is counter-productive if you really want people to help you.
Replies to posts will often be short and to the point simply because the responder has limited time. Don't mistake terseness for rudeness.
Many people who post questions and requests for help may have made very basic mistakes. If you omit the details of everything you thought of and checked before making your post, don't be insulted if someone replies with a very basic suggestion or a link to something that you have already read.
Don't "hijack" existing threads to talk about a topic different from the original poster's topic. Start your own thread instead.
In an ordinary conversation, no one appreciates the person who barges in and insists on changing the topic of dicsussion. And if two groups of people actually insist on trying to simulataneously carry on a discussion on two distinct topics within the same conversation, the result is usually confusing to everyone.
The Forum provides a mechanism by which you may be automatically notified whenever a new posting is made to the Forum. This is done via a web feature called RSS (Really Simple Syndication).
An RSS feed is a special web page that lists recent changes to a website. For example, websites devoted to current news will provide a feed listing newly posted articles. A program called an RSS reader or aggregator will allow you to subscribe to an RSS feed, after which it will periodically read check that feed and notify you of any changes.
An RSS feed is indicated by this icon: 
If you want to take advantage of the course's RSS feeds, you must
Get and run an RSS reader
Subscribe to the course RSS feeds
There are a lot of RSS readers out there, including a number of high-quality ones that are available for free. A basic web search should turn up quite a few. Increasingly, many email programs and web browsers will include a built-in RSS capability. For example, the Firefox browser and the Micrsoft Outlook email readers will allow you to subscribe to RSS feeds. There are also a number of web-based readers, such as Feedly.
In the Forum: