When instructors and students return to campus for Spring Quarter, they will notice some key improvements to CourseWork, Stanford's course management system.
More Servers Added to Help Speed Up the Login Process
Additional servers have been added to the production environment in response to the slow login issues experienced during the beginning of Winter Quarter. Doubling the total numbers of CourseWork servers will help spread the distribution of login attempts, thereby reducing the likelihood of slow logins.
Time-Saving Features for Instructional Staff
With the release of CourseWork version 3.3.1 in Spring Quarter, instructors, head teaching assistants, and course administrators will have the ability to modify certain course settings after a CourseWork course site has been set up. Under Course and Section Setup, instructional staff will have permission to modify the following course settings:
- Edit course title.
- Edit CourseWork site access options. This includes auto-populating a CourseWork site with Axess enrollment and/or allowing students to add themselves to a CourseWork site.
- Add/remove CourseForum (the discussion tool in CourseWork).
- Restrict a CourseWork course site so that only instructors can access the site after the quarter ends.
Instructional staff will benefit from these timesaving features since they will no longer have to submit a HelpSU ticket and wait for these changes to be made by the central CourseWork support team.
Useful Guidelines on Copyright Compliance
The CourseWork team has been working with the Office of the General Counsel to provide more useful copyright guidelines to instructional staff when adding content to their CourseWork sites.
The content upload process now includes links to industry-accepted safe harbor guidelines and promotes best practices such as reminding instructional staff to link to the Stanford Libraries' electronic repositories or to content materials publicly available on the World Wide Web. Additionally, instructional staff can now submit copyright questions directly to a University expert who can address specific needs.
For More Information
For more information about CourseWork see:
