Signup Tool

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The CSE Signup Tool

Often, it's necessary to have each student in a class sign up for, say, a meeting with the instructor. The instructor sets aside a few blocks of time, sets a duration for each meeting, and asks each student to sign up. An easy way to do that is to paste a sheet of paper on the instructor's office door with the available times blocked out and ask each student to pick a slot by filling in their name.

When most of the students are off-campus, that approach is less practical. This CSE Signup Tool has been developed to meet the need.

The tool makes these assumptions:

• There is only one "sign-up resource" per course active at any time.
• Each meeting has the same duration chosen from the set [5, 10, 15, 20, 30, 45, 60, 75, 90].
• Each meeting involves precisely one student. (For groups, though, one student from each group can be designated to sign up, and you can also run multiple simultaneous meetings.)
• Either
• A list of students enrolled in the class is provided by the instructor in a flat file in the course web.
or
• All students in the class have CSE accounts.

If your situation meets these constraints, then you can use the CSE Signup Tool without further ado. Read on.

(See also the similar Presentation Tool, which is useful for such managing tasks as signing up to present a paper in class when the set of papers to be presented is known.)

Preparing to Use the Tool

There are two versions of the tool:

• A version that uses CSENetID authentication. That tool frees you from the need to create a flat file of student names, and offers the students the ability to renounce their own reservations. But, like all CSENetID-authenticated resources it's only useful to users with CSE accounts. If that's true of your situation, this version is prefered.
• A version that is free of authentication. To use this version, you must create a flat file with all the students names. Only administrators are able to renounce reservations. Use this version of the tool if your users don't all have CSE accounts.

To use the tool, you must first create a configuration file and copy it to your web. The configuration file is created using the tool itself:

• follow this link if you are using CSENetID
• follow this link if you are planning to use a flat file of student names

The key configuration information you will provide is:

• a title for the meetings, such as "CSE 666 Project Presentations"
• a set of dates and a range of times on each date when the meetings will take place
• the duration of each meeting
• the number of simultaneous meetings you will run
• if using CSENetID authentication, the usernames of the members of the teaching team

The tool will guide you through the details of creating and copying the file.

If you aren't useing CSENetID, the tool will need a list of student names in order to create a pick list. That's a text file in the course web called .htstudents with each student name on a separate line. For example, for CSE666 you would create a file called /cse/www/education/courses/cse666/CurrentQtr/.htstudents. The web server must be able to read that file, but is configured not to serve it directly to web users.

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Using the Tool

To use the tool after the configuration and student list files are created, create a link in your course web to /htbin-post/education/signup.cgi. For example, the instructor of CSE666 would edit /cse/www/education/courses/cse666/CurrentQtr/index.html to contain a link that might look like this: <a href="/htbin-post/education/signup.cgi">sign up to present your project</a>. It's important that the link be from some file in the course web, because that's how the tool knows what course is being served. For example, it won't work to provide the link from your home page, because your home page URL doesn't hint at what course you are teaching.

Students who click on that link will be able to see what slots are available and select from those still available.

Renouncing a Reservation

If you are using CSENetID, students can renounce their own reservation(s), and administrators can renounce any reservation. If you are using the version without authentication, renouncing an existing reservation is slightly complicated. You have two choices:

• If you link to the tool as /htbin-post/unrestricted/education/signup.cgi/admin, students themselves will be able to both make and break reservations.
• If you prefer to control the renouncing of rservations youself, contact me and I'll explain how to do it.

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In Conclusion

Comments to the developer are welcomed.

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	Department of Computer Science & Engineering University of Washington Box 352350 Seattle, WA  98195-2350 (206) 543-1695 voice, (206) 543-2969 FAX [comments to webmaster@cs.washington.edu]