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Web Services Information
Course Pages
If you are creating and maintaining your own course page(s), please
send your URLs to
when your pages are up and
available for viewing at the start of each semester. We maintain a
departmental course page registry on which all of our course URLs are
listed for easy reference. At the end of the semester the registry is
archived as an historical resource.
If you have assigned course page creation and maintenance to
qualified staff assistants, please remind the assistants to
send in the URLs to
when the pages
are available for viewing.
If you run into problems or have any
questions, please send e-mail to
.
There is no requirement for a course home page in the Economics
Department, and no official procedure for creating and maintaining a
course home page. This activity is left to the discretion of the
instructor.
There are several ways to manage course home pages.
An instructor who wishes to have creative control over
design and content can use the following:
bSpace, a highly recommended
option, is an online collaboration and learning environment supported by
Educational Technology Services (ETS).
This system provides the campus with a set of tools that support teaching and
learning activities, as well as cross-campus collaboration. For course websites,
it uses the official information from the Schedule of Classes allowing instructors
to view the class roster and send email to the class.
The Open Computing Facility (OCF) is
an all-volunteer, student-run, student-initiated service group that offers free
webspace (400 MB) among other services.
"free" commercial account on googlepages, yahoo, etc., all of which offer
free web pages.
For regular faculty only, if you have a personal mirror site
on 'elsa', you can create and manage course home pages
from your personal mirror. This would be inaccessible to any
GSR/GSIs or untrained staff assistants, because you
would have to share your userid and password, which is
forbidden.
The campus requires us to comply with ADA guidelines, so
if you are maintaining your own pages, please
make an effort to learn about these requirements. The
Economics Department complies with campus web guidelines
and applicable federal and state laws.
The campus is also encouraging web authors to conform to XML, the new
standard in markup language. For most of us, it means
adhering to the XHTML transitional markup rules. Please
visit http://www.w3.org
(the WWW consortium's web site,
where standards are developed, tested, and posted) for
information on XHTML.
An instructor who is willing to waive creative control
over design and some content can ask a qualified
staff person to create
and maintain the course home page. Administrative Services Unit assistants
have
been trained to update course websites based on a basic course website
template.
Designated departmental web team members are
sometimes available to maintain course pages if a staff
assistant is not available. Visiting instructors can ask their staff
assistants to create and maintain a course page for them on a shared
visitor's mirror site. What is required:
Course number and title, instructor(s) name(s),
GSI(s) name(s), office location and office hours, and
lecture meeting location and day(s) and time(s).
What you want uploaded to the course home page should be
emailed as PDF, backwardly compatible to Acrobat 3.
Staff do not do file conversions, and will not upload
proprietary format source files (such as Word or WordPerfect).
Qualified PC systems in the department have access to
the departmental Acrobat license and documentation on
how to do file conversions, so with a little effort,
anyone can learn how to do PDF quickly and easily.
(For uploading data for assignments, we recommend plain
columnar ascii files, as long as they are small. For
large datasets, we can put them in the class data area on
the server, if you have EML class accounts, or we can
put them on 'elsa', our ftp/web server, for browser ftp
downloads.)
Staff should receive electronic files for upload a minimum of one day
in advance of posting.
The department uses a simple course template, easy to navigate,
and functional, without any bells and whistles,
accommodate downloads by students with slow modems or
older systems with old browser releases.
All files for web pages are maintained on a "mirror" site
on the EML's production fileserver , and are "pushed" across
to the 'elsa' web/ftp server at every
even-numbered hour (except for 2am, 4am, and 8am),
so updates to the course home pages are not
immediate ('socrates' permits direct writes, so updates on
'socs' are
immediate). Our 2-hour delay is designed to enable local
previewing and proofing of materials before being made publicly
accessible.
If staff assistants are out of the office, your course home pages may
not be updated in a timely manner. Please remember the built-in
delays and the mirror's "push" schedule.
Reminder: if you recycle problem sets and exams, you may wish to
remove your answer sets after the semester is over.
Faculty Home Pages
Faculty are welcome to maintain a personal home page
similarly to that described above for course home pages.
If a non-EML service is used, please send the URL to
so that the proper link can
be created on the department's faculty web site. The
faculty directory of personal home pages is accessible
from the Faculty link on the department's home page at
http://www.econ.berkeley.edu/.
If a faculty member would like to maintain a personal
home page on the EML's web server (elsa.berkeley.edu),
s/he is welcome to do so:
Open an Econometrics Laboratory account and sign a
copyright compliance agreement. Forms are downloadable
from http://emlab.berkeley.edu/eml/index.shtml . Return the forms to
the department's IT Manager in 643 Evans Hall.
A mirror site will be created for you, accessible via
your personal EML account, on the production fileserver.
You may use your own design, or you may wish to use the
department's template.
The departmental web team is available for advice. Please
send e-email to
if you have a question or
are seeking assistance with your web-related tasks.