Online Course Management at WSU¶

This post contains some notes about how to effectively use Office 365 (OneDrive), and Google Drive (via the G-Suite for education) for teaching a course at WSU. These notes were developed in the Fall of 2018 while I set up the courses for Physics 450 (undergraduate quantum mechanics) and Physics 521 (graduate classical mechanics).

Overview¶

There are several interacting pieces that need to be coordinated when using online technology:

My WSU:¶

Ultimately, grades must be uploaded to My WSU. This can be done fairly easily with a spreadsheet export.

Blackboard LMS:¶

This is the current online course management system at WSU. Note: Likely WSU will switch to Canvas, so don't invest too heavily in Blackboard-specific features. I use the following features:

• Grade Management: Students expect to receive their grades here, so I upload them from my spreadsheets to Blackboard.
• Announcements: I sent announcements to the class through Blackboard.
• Assignments: I post assignments on Blackboard.
• Integration with tools: Not relevant for 450, but when we used Pearson Mastering Physics for 200-level courses, access was enabled through Blackboard.

Office 365¶

WSU officially supports Office 365 for some features such as email, groups, sharepoints, Excel, Word, Skype, etc. This is the natural place to start looking for online course tools, and is the only approved place to store grades etc. in a (FERPA compliant](https://edu.google.com/k-12-solutions/privacy-security/) manner.

• Excel: I use for managing grades in spreadsheets.
• Word: Could be used for sharing documents, but I prefer the Google Docs interface.
• One Drive: Provides >1TB storage for each student/faculty. Klunky app for selective syncing if you want to work with material offline. In principle can be used as a remote for git-annex, but this requires administrator approval to enable rclone access and I have been waiting almost a year for this.
• Azure Notebooks: In principle, could be a place to share Jupyter notebooks, but this needs administrator approval and currently WSU does not do this, or does it extremely slowly. Not an option at present.

G-Suite for Education¶

WSU currently only supports G-Suite for Education for Chrome-book on boarding. Although in principle G-Suite for Education should be FERPA compliant, ITS has not run a security review yet and so will not officially support it for storing data etc. (Apparently there might be insurance issues...)

Please note that regular Google Drive tools should not be used for managing grades or any other personal data as the regular Google Drive tools are not FERPA compliant.

G-Suite provides some nice tools:

• CoLaboratory Notebooks: These are a modified form of Jupyter notebook, similar to Azure Notebooks but with some differences. Since I can allow access to these without administrative approval, I have started exploring these for teaching and have a few comments:
  • Students have very easy access. There is much less of a learning curve and fewer sources of confusion that when using CoCalc (though CoCalc is much more powerful and complete.)

G-Suite¶

Thus, your institution must have registered their domain as a valid educational site. Finding out who your administrator is may be a challenge.

WSU Specifics¶

At WSU, Bill Rivers is currently the administrator for G-Suite, but ITS currently only provides official support from Chrome-book on-boarding. I am working on getting a slightly expanded set of support, but presently have to deal with everything manually, as I describe below.

The first step is to obtain administrative access to the G-Suite. An administrator must add users. Currently I can do this, so let me know if you need help (m.forbes@wsu.edu).

Colaboratory¶

Once nice feature of G-Suite is the availability of Colaboratory. This is an add-on application that can store and run Jupyter notebooks. There are quite a few limitations (no ipywidgets, vpython, etc.) but it is very convenient if you can avoid these features as it does not required students to create a CoCalc account or install anything on their computer. (For more serious work, I highly recommend CoCalc.)

To save my work, I commit my notebooks (after removing output with Runtime/Restart runtime) to a GitHub repository, which is possible using the File/Save Copy in GitHub menu option.

Onboarding¶

Users can be added individually or via spreadsheet upload. The latter is more appropriate for large groups. A couple of points to note:

• Use the users @wsu.edu email address. (Documents can be shared with outside users, but this might violate some security protocols, so for official use, please restrict your drives to users in the organization with @wsu.edu addresses.)
• Provide a sufficiently long initial password or the system will reject the upload.
• Specify the appropriate organizational unit (download a sample set of users to see the format).
• Make sure to set the last field to True to force users to change their password when they log in.
• You will need to send an email to the users informing them of their account and initial password.
• Note: several people confuse logging in with their personal accounts. They need to sign in again with their WSU email address, otherwise they will not be able to access the system. One can fairly easily switch between a personal login and the institutional login.
• One potential issue is if people have associated their @wsu.edu email address with a personal account. If they have done this, they will be forced to separate these when they log in and any files etc. previously associated with the @wsu.edu address will be moved to a personal account of their choosing.

Groups¶

Administrators can create groups. Since we use Office 365 for emails, one cannot create a new group email address here (though one is required for the group). Perhaps this can be improved later. I use groups to simplify allowing access to collaborative team drives as discussed below.

Team Drives¶

Currently, I create two team drives for each course. One private for grading (I envision that this will contain all course material over the years) and one shared with the students for collaboration. For example:

• Physics 450: (Private): This is the private Team Drive for the course. I keep grades etc. here and share this only with TAs or other administrative assistants. When I create this drive, I go to the "Team Drive settings" and disable all sharing so that only explicit members can see and edit the content.
• Physics 450: Fall 2018: This is the shared Team Drive for class participation. I create a "Physics 450" group with all the students, and then allow this group access to this team drive for collaboration.

Grading¶

I originally started grading with Google Sheets, but since G-Suite is not yet officially supported for storing WSU data, I have migrated to Excel. The export seemed to work flawlessly, but the it seems that editing conditional formatting does not work with Excel online. (I have not tried using the desktop version yet.)

1. First export the grades from Blackboard from the "Work Offline" button in the "Grade Center/Full Grade Center" tab at the left. This will allow you to download a spreadsheet with all students which can then be imported to Google Sheets.
   • Before downloading, you might like to make sure that Last Name, First Name, and Student ID are visible under the Manage/Column Organization tab.
2. Import this information into a sheet named Roster. I add one extra column with fixed numbers defining an Order (can be useful later) and an extra row to give some space for totals. Be sure to keep the columns Last Name, First Name, and Student ID. The latter is required when you want to upload back to Blackboard.
   • I can't figure out how to import a sheet into Excel Online, so I have to copy and paste after first opening the file on my computer.
3. When creating a sheet for an assignment and an exam:
   1. Link the first three rows to the Roster sheet with references like Roster!B1.
   2. Freeze these with View/Freeze.
4. For assignments etc. I create a second row with "Points per problem".

5. (optional) Apply conditional formatting to the grade cells with something like this:

   • Apply to range D3:AO18.
   • Custom formula =and(D3>=0.9*D$2, not(isblank(D3))): Green cell (for >=90% of Points per problem).
   • Custom formula =and(D3<0.5*D$2, not(isblank(D3))): Red cell (for < 50% of Points per problem).

   This will easily allow you to see which students are performing poorly and which are performing well. Missing points will remain white.

Uploading to Blackboard¶

To upload grades to Blackboard, first export the grades from Blackboard from the Work Offline button in the Grade Center/Full Grade Center tab at the left. You must make Excel or Google Sheets export a .csv file that matches this format. Note: you will need to include all of the columns that are listed in that file, including the "Username" column. You do not need to use quotes, and Blackboard works with Student IDs as numbers (you can drop the leading zero) but MyWSU will not work that way.

Office 365¶

Excel Online¶

Excel Online is really bad. It seems very crippled compared with Google Sheets and the desktop version (which I do not have space to install). The following are not supported by the online program (but can apparently be setup with the desktop app and then used online):

• Editing conditional formatting.
• Naming cells.

Modern Groups¶

To create a "Modern Group" you need to submit a request to ITS:

• Office 365 Modern Group Creation Form
• Office 365: Groups Overview and Requirements

Once your group is approved and created, you must access it through Outlook. This provides a very obfuscated view from which you can access the Site or the Files. Still learning this one.