Cecil for
Mathematics Courses
Notes by David
Smith February 2003
There is a pretty
good online help facility for Cecil including an excellent online animated
tutorial:
But the following notes may be more specific for starting out to set up Cecil for use in the Math course you are teaching.
Getting Started
To use Cecil, you first of all have to have Cecil Explorer installed. Ask John Rogers, or email help@math.auckland.ac.nz. You might also ask him to set it up so that the Cecil window fills your screen. Also you should ask him to set it up so that you can print from Cecil to a local printer. For Unix system users, Cecil is installed by default and can be accessed by typing “cecil” in a terminal. Then you have to get a login from the Cecil Help Desk: ext 85993 or 84633. The people there are helpful and competent and will likely be happy to guide you through the inevitable and numerous sticky spots on the phone or by coming to your office. Everybody on the teaching team for a course can be authorised to operate on the site and can see everything that is there, but be careful not to accidentally make things visible to students that need to remain hidden or to hide things they need to see.
Structure of Site
Once you get logged in, you will see a window with a tree on the left whose root is your name and with branches corresponding to courses you are authorized to operate in. You click on the nodes to expand them. Expanding the node next to a course name shows branches labeled Topics, Test Templates, Activities, Communications, Students. Forget about Test Templates.
Structuring the site will be a personal choice. I use Topics to store copies of all course materials handed out in the semester, and I created an Activity called Learning Resources to file such things as Study Guide, assorted handouts, previous semester materials, etc. There is plenty of room for variety and originality in how this part is organized. One of the problems is that you can’t search around Cecil like you can on web pages to see how other people have done it.
You can create a Topic folder by right clicking (right click = Option+click on the Mac) on the Topics branch and selecting New Topic. Then you type the name and Enter. You can get rid of the one you made by right clicking on the new name and selecting Delete. Try it.
Uploading Documents
Having created Topics (such as for example Assignments , Class Tests, Exams, Tutorials, Miscellaneous Handouts, you name it, I use it for current semester materials only), you can add documents to the folders. To do so, for example to add a document to a Topic called Assignments, click the Topics/Assignments icon (it is a book and it opens when you select it) and then the list of documents already placed under this topic if any will appear on the right side of the screen. Right click (remember Option+click for Mac users) anywhere in the list (or in the space where the list will be after you have a list) and select New/File Resource. Click the expand arrow in the Look In box on the right hand side, and a list of computers appears, and yours will be somewhat improbably called Desktop/My Computer/C$on’Client’(H:). Click on that and you will see the files on your own desktop. Find the file you want to upload to Cecil and double click on it. It will upload. At this point, the files you uploaded will not be visible to the students. See the next paragraph.
Now, suppose you have an Activities folder called Assignment (it is likely that you will have one since Jaya has probably already created it so she can use it to record marks). If you open that node, you will see the list of assignments for the semester. Say the document you just uploaded to a Topic (in the previous paragraph) is named Asst01, and you want the students to be able to see it. You need to associate that document with the Activity called Assignment 1. To do that, select Assignment 1 from the tree and on the right you will see tabs called Description| Documents| Topics| Sessions| Properties| etc. Select Topics and you will see a box called Filter. Click the arrow and select All. The complete list of documents under the different Topics you have made appears, and you tick the ones you want to associate with Assignment 1 (so far it is just the one, Asst01). Now you set the date and time you want it to be shown to the students by right-clicking on the name of the document and selecting Properties. A box will appear that lets you set the date and time.
Assessment and Marks
Activities may be assessed or not. (For example, an Activity called Learning Resources might just have associated with it copies of past assignments and solutions for student reference. Not to be assessed.) To specify this for a given activity, right click on its name in the tree, and tick or untick the box called “Is Activity Assessed?”
Also you specify when the activity is set, when it is due, how many marks are possible and when the marks are to be visible to the students as follows: select the Activity on the tree. On the right hand side click the Properties tab. Tick the box to the right of the Due date and set the date and time. Then tick the box to the right of the Set date and set the date and time. If you do it in the other order it complains that the due date precedes the set date and it blocks you and it makes you mad. You can then set the mark viewable date, but don’t set it to a time before the marks are entered or the students get mad. You enter the number of marks possible in the box.
Once you have set handout dates and due dates etc, the students are automatically informed by means of a marked calendar when they log in.
To enter or change marks for an assessed Activity, select the Activity on the tree, and click the Marks tab. The list of students will appear with a space for the mark to be entered. If you change an existing mark, a box will appear asking you to explain why.
Class Announcements
To send a notice to the whole class, click on the Course Name branch of the tree (at the top) and a Create New Announcement icon appears on the right hand side. Click on it and a wizard leads you through the process and gives you the option of emailing the notice to all students as well.
You can also see what the students see by clicking on Student View. You will have to navigate around in it just like the students do in order to find out how the documents you have loaded and the notices you have sent, etc appear to the students. It doesn’t bear a very natural resemblance to the structure you have created from the Course Organiser’s view, and I find that a little frustrating.
There is a wizard that leads you through an alternative process of putting documents online (it is invoked by clicking the Put Files Online icon). This process is a little limiting in the sense that you don’t get freedom of naming rights and you can only associate them with particular Activities. But it’s easy to use. A warning: Once you create one of these things and name it and say it is assessed, you can’t get rid of it or change its name, at least I can’t.
If there is already a webpage for the course, you can point the students to the webpage from Cecil as follows: Click on the Course name at the top of the tree, and then click the Course Details tab on the right hand side. You can enter the web address, and also your own e-mail address so the students can contact you directly.
File Formats
Finally, as Paul Bonnington mentioned, the favoured format to use for documents uploaded to Cecil is PDF. It seems to be the one most universally viewable, downloadable and printable for the students. For Unix/LaTeX users, there is a command called “dvi2pdf”. For Mac users, most files can be converted to pdf by dropping them on desktop printer icons “PDFWriter” or “Create Adobe PDF”. If you have handwritten assignment solutions, for example, you can get them into PDF form by scanning them on a flatbed scanner to a Pict file (I find something like Line Art option best and a resolution of 100 DPI seems adequate), and then you can convert the Pict file to a PDF by using Acrobat Distiller or PDFWriter or something similar. I find that a PDF file from a scanned page takes up about 40 k. Ask someone about scanning, for example David Thomson ext 88817 who is vastly experienced.
Good luck. I am willing to try to answer questions. Paul Bonnington probably knows more answers than I.
David Smith Ext 88778.