CourseWork, Stanford's system for authoring and managing course Web pages, now supports over 12,000 users who have created over 700 course Web sites. The new version released in Fall Quarter offers enhancements that include linkage to the Registrar's database of students, expanded assignment and grade book features, as well as other features requested by faculty.

The system is designed both for faculty with little Web experience, who will be able to develop their course Web site quickly, and for expert Web-users, who can organize complex, Web-based materials and link them to CourseWork communication, authorization, and assessment tools. To access CourseWork, students and instructors use a standard Web browser on any type of common computer.

CourseWork has generated keen interest and ideas from faculty and support staff at Stanford, as indicated by these examples of proposals and plans for projects, either underway or in discussion:

In addition, many universities have requested information about CourseWork. Stanford plans to make CourseWork available as an open source release in the coming year. As a first step in preparing for the release, Academic Computing staff assisted several universities as they set up local implementations of CourseWork last quarter. These institutions will review CourseWork and explore how its design addresses the needs of their institutions. Denison University and Hamilton College are participating in the trials and will inform the Mellon-funded National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education about CourseWork. Further planning for the open source release will be based on these trials.

A new Assignment and Assessment Manager (AAM) is being developed for CourseWork in the next year. Stanford will use its experience with the existing assignment tool as it creates a new modular, plug-in version that interacts with other systems. The AAM project is being funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

The CourseWork Development Team will continue to improve the system based on suggestions and feedback from students and instructors. If you have any suggestions for features that you would like in CourseWork, please let the team know by sending email to charles.kerns@stanford.edu. For more information on new and upcoming features, see the Web at http://coursework.stanford.edu or contact Kimberly Hayworth by sending email to kimhwrth@stanford.edu.

The Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) continues its efforts to assist faculty in incorporating technology into their courses.

At the beginning of Fall Quarter, SUL/AIR and ITSS co-sponsored the third Information Technology Open House for faculty, staff and students in Meyer Library. Attendees met, asked questions, and learned about resources from over 40 technology services groups from around campus. Specific information about each of the services group represented at the Open House is on the Web at http://itopenhouse.stanford.edu/

New to this Open House was the raffle of an Apple iPod, MP3 player, which was donated by the Stanford Bookstore. Xiuping Yang, a library specialist who works in Meyer Library, won the prize. Xiuping had just started working at Stanford the previous week, and hence decided that Stanford was a great place to work!

The attendance at the fair was very good and it proved to be beneficial to both attendees and participants. The next IT Open House will be held in Spring Quarter. An announcement with more information will be widely distributed. You can also check the IT Open House Web site for details.

Over the last few years Stanford experienced a significant increase in the amount of unsolicited bulk email "spam" aimed at the campus email system. The amount has doubled since last year. So did the complaints. Everyone wanted to know why Stanford couldn't filter spam out of its mail system.

The answer, of course, is that it's not as easy as it looks: one man's junk mail is another man's treasure. And Stanford has to be careful about violating freedoms of speech and privacy that apply to email. That said, after months of research into different spam filtering techniques, ITSS found a system that balances these concerns and meets everyone's "@stanford" email needs.

The system, developed by PerlMX (www.activestate.com), scans incoming email for certain phrases or key-words common to spam. The system revealed that as much as 35 percent of the email coming through the Stanford mail gateway can be spam. At that rate, for all of Stanford, the system might find over 175,000 pieces of spam per day.

Note, however, that the spam filter does not delete spam: it identifies it before it gets into your Inbox. When the system identifies email as possible spam, it adds a tag "[SPAM:####]" to the subject line. Email that *might* be spam gets one # mark. Obvious spam gets six # marks. Using this key, you can decide for yourself how to deal with incoming unsolicited mail. The simplest solution is to create a filter in your email program (e.g., Eudora) and process spam away from your Inbox.

Spammers are tricky and no system is foolproof. Some valid messages may be misidentified as spam. Others that are spam may get through. Procedures have been established to help people communicate these glitches in the system.

Please check out http://email.stanford.edu/antispam.html for more information about these procedures and about the new anti-spam system in general. If you have problems with or questions about these procedures, please send your request via the Web at http://helpsu.stanford.edu, or call 725-HELP (725-4357).

Computers and other hosts on the Stanford network that are vulnerable to attack are a danger to both themselves and other systems that share the network. Once attackers gain control of a computer they can do anything to it, such as expose private information, change or damage specific data, modify the system to periodically send key information elsewhere, or even completely erase the hard drive. In addition, the attacker can use the compromised computer to gain access to other network resources or to mount attacks on other machines, either locally or outside of the Stanford network.

In Fall Quarter, Information Security Services began actively scanning Stanford's network for vulnerable computers. This activity is part of a program to raise the overall level of Stanford's network security.

Working in close cooperation with Residential Computing staff, initial scanning has occurred on the student residential network. Over 4,300 computers were scanned, checking for the common, and very serious, vulnerability of unset or easily guessed passwords. In that first pass, more than 200 computers were found to be vulnerable and were corrected.

With over 40,000 connected hosts to scan, Information Security Services will be scanning the network in sections. Results of the scans will be distributed to the computer user and to the affiliated support contact. A follow up scan of each section will be run to assess whether the vulnerabilities have been fixed. Computers identified with continued serious exposures during the follow up scans may be removed from the network to protect them from being compromised. These scans will be repeated periodically to maintain the heightened level of security across the entire network.

If you have any questions about this or other Information Security Services programs, please visit their Web site at http://security.stanford.edu or contact them directly at Security-nr@stanford.edu or 723-2911.

Stanford faculty would like to assume that the students who sign up for their courses have already learned certain basic material. Experienced instructors know, however, that many students have not had the prerequisite courses, have taken them several years ago, or simply did not develop a deep enough understanding of the concepts to use them in the current course.

There are several options for dealing with students who are not as prepared as the instructor would like. Professors or their TAs can spend time going over this material in class or during office hours. They can recommend books, courses, or other materials and hope for the best. Or they can create a custom tutorial, tailored specifically for their students' needs, which students can access online and work through on their own. This latter option is what the Stanford Center for Professional Development (SCPD) calls a "courselet." Thanks to a generous grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, a sizable portfolio of courselets will be released at Stanford over the next calendar year.

Electronic resources that Stanford instructors can use for their courses are collected on the Web at http://courses.stanford.edu/.

Included on the site are a variety of computer- and technology-based resources and services that can help instructors start, organize, and teach their classes.

You can also call the SCPD at (650)725-3000.

The Stanford Center for Professional Development (SCPD) collaborates with School of Engineering faculty and other Stanford University departments to deliver over 10,000 hours annually of academic graduate education and short courses for engineers, scientists, technology professionals, and managers in industry. Courses are delivered via the Stanford Instructional Television Network and Stanford Online, as well as on campus. For more information, visit the Web at http://scpd.stanford.edu/.

The SCPD has the following courselets ready for use this quarter. Note that several of the courselets integrate MIT Microelectronics Weblab and SemiZone's interactive virtual MOSFET applet. SemiZone (http://www.semizone.com/) is an educational partner with the SCPD. See also ""Courselets: Online tutorials Designed for Stanford Science and Engineering Courses".

During Winter Quarter, Stanford will change its official search engine from Ultraseek to Google.

The version of the UltraSeek software that SU is running is now well out-of-date compared to Verity's current version and has reached the limits of that version's capacity. In addition, that version no longer accommodates many Stanford users' needs nor provides the results that those users would like to see.

ITSS has been looking for a good replacement since June 2002. After extensive research into different search products, the Google search engine was selected because it applies a search approach that seems optimally suited to Stanford users' search environment needs. Upgrading to Google confers several advantages:

· Provides helpful, related results for search requests.
· Lets Stanford build a collection that includes:
· regular Web sites,
· secure (https) Web sites,
· all sites in the current Stanford collection, and
· sub-collections that have been defined within the larger collection (so you can limit their search to a sub-collection).
· Lets you define your own collections.
· Lets you define the look and feel of your search request and your search results.