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DEPARTMENTAL POLICIES: POLICIES ON PERSONAL HOME PAGES AMD COURSE PAGES

Following are some guidelines and policies for creating official and personal faculty homepages and course homepages for inclusion in the departmental web site. For any remaining questions, please send mail to the webmaster.

Summary:

1. Official Homepages:

The department maintains a set of official faculty homepages, which contain some basic information. Most full time faculty already have a page, but it is recommended that every faculty member (including part time) should consider getting a page. The faculty member is responsible for sending an update to the webmaster, if any of the information on the page changes. See further below on how to get your page.

2. Personal Homepage:

A list of personal faculty pages is accessible here . Every faculty member may have a page listed here. If a faculty member has an official page, but no personal page, then the official page is currently listed by default. If you already have a page, either inside or outside the poly.edu domain, then you can send the URL to the webmaster to have it added. If you would like to create a page on the cis server, see further below.

3. Course Homepages:

Many faculty members maintain course homepages during the semester they teach a course. Some/many of these pages are accessible at here (Graduate) and here (undergraduate). At the beginning of each semester, please send the URL of any course page that you are maintaining during that semester to the webmaster, including pages for courses in Westchester and Farmingdale. In your message, please include the URL, the name of the course, and the campus where it is held. In the case where there are several sections of a class, please indicate which sections of the class are "covered" by your course page. Also, we request that you send another email to our webmaster at the end of each semester, before you erase the page again, so that we can archive your course page. There are three choices of archiving the page.
  1. You can tell us not to archive anything at all.
  2. You can allow your course page to be archived so that it will be available only to OTHER MEMBERS OF THE DEPARTMENT (faculty, not students) on the web, protected by a password.
  3. You can allow your course page to be archived and to be kept freely accessible over the web.

If you already sent a message to us earlier this semester indicating a choice, we will follow that message. Otherwise, if we do not hear from you, we will take option (3) for course pages inside the poly.edu domain (and option (1) for pages outside). Note that AT ANY TIME in the future, you can tell the webmaster to take down your old pages, or parts of it (e.g., solutions) and only make it available via password. One email to webmaster@cis is enough.

Please consider at least allowing us to do the archiving in (2). The reason for this is to allow colleagues teaching a course to look at past offerings, and also to have some information on past offerings available to help in the upcoming ABET/CSAB accreditation process. The reason for public access is to allow students (and employers who pay the tuition) to look at offerings.

Important:

Note that the preferred way of maintaining personal WebPages and course WebPages on cis.poly.edu is to get an account on that machine and to maintain the pages within that account, and not within the directory structure of our departmental web site! See further below on how to get an account set up. If your page resides on another server, that is absolutely fine - just send us the URL.

Details:

1. How to get an official homepage:

The easiest way is to go to
http://cis.poly.edu/people/facultyinfo.htm and click on any of the links to look at some sample pages. Then send your information - typically contact information and maybe research or teaching interests, courses taught, publications, or current students, if applicable - in a similar format to webmaster; webmaster will create the page for you.

You can also download the file to your account, edit it, and send it in, of course. We will however make sure these pages are all in the same format. You can send additional or updated information at any time,  but the file itself is maintained on cis.poly.edu by the webmaster.

2. Creating a personal homepage:

If you want to create a personal WebPages, with any (legal) content that you want, you would have to do that yourself. To create a page directly on the CIS server, you should first get an account on cis.poly.edu, by contacting webmaster. Also ask for a link in your account to be created that will hold your pages. After you have prepared your pages, you can ftp them into the directory corresponding to the link (mostly ~/public_html), where they immediately become available on the web. Your top page should have the name "index.htm" or "index.html" to make sure it is linked correctly.

You can of course create your homepage on some other server inside or outside the poly.edu domain, and send us the URL. You are responsible for creating and maintaining this page. The easiest way to create such a page is to get a file from somebody else in the department and modify it. At the moment, due to time constraints, the webmaster cannot give much help in the design, but feel free to ask for help if you have specific questions. Also note that it is strongly preferred that you ftp the files to the server after creating them on some other machine - please only use your account on cis.poly.edu for uploading and short editing sessions, to keep the load low.

Templates for the navigation bars on our pages are available here. Using these on personal pages is entirely voluntary, though.

3. Creating a course homepage:

Follow basically the same guidelines as for creating a personal homepage. You may/should ask the webmaster to create an extra link in your cis account for each course page. Please send the URLs of all your course pages to the webmaster at the beginning of each semester - this includes courses taught at Westchester and Farmingdale. If you have not designed a page before, the webmaster may be able to give some limited help - just ask.

Around the end of each semester, we plan to archive the content of each course page in order to preserve the information, e.g., for reference by prospective students or accreditation agencies. In the past, many course pages were lost because most faculty overwrote their previous pages with the new material at the beginning of the next semester. Since we did not want to have any new rules and restrictions about where to place and how to structure the course pages, we decided to use explicit copying (archiving) of the content into a new directory.

Archived pages will remain accessible on the web in subsequent semesters. However, you can send the webmaster an email at any time telling him to remove a page from a previous semester, or parts of it such as exercises and solutions, from the web site. Also, if you do not want your pages to be archived at all, just notify us. (If we do not hear from you, the page will be archived, unless it is outside the poly.edu domain, in which case we will ask for permission first.) As menioned above, we would appreciate an email at the end of the semester when the page is complete, and before it is overwritten.

Templates for the navigation bars and pages are available here.


 
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