Docs:Course Structure

This page, and the pages linked from it, provides details of the structure, naming conventions, and content requirements that courses within a course development wiki must follow. It is very important that you read through all these documents, and that the guidelines are followed carefully, otherwise the support tools (in particular wiki2course.pl) will not be able to correctly process your course material. This page, and the specification pages linked below, assume that you have already read the Course Development page and understand the concepts it discusses.

If you are ever unsure about how to structure the contents of your material, please look at the C Programming course, as that is currently the most complete example implementation of this specification.

Namespace requirement

All courses in the wiki must occupy their own unique namespace. While it would be technically feasible for two or more courses to share a namespace, the administrative and structural overheads of providing this feature are significant and can be easily avoided. By ensuring that there is a one-to-one relationship between namespaces and courses, problems of identifying which course a given page in the wiki belongs to go away.

This means that, before you can begin working on a course in the wiki, you must have been allocated a namespace for it. Namespace allocation can currently only be accomplished by staff members with direct access to the wiki configuration: if you need a namespace for your course, please contact apesupport@cs.man.ac.uk to request one.

Namespace issues are discussed more in Help:Namespaces.

Overall course structure

Diagram showing the structure of a course in the wiki

In order to allow the export and processor tools to convert your course material into a standalone course package, your material within the wiki must be organised into a rigidly defined structure. The diagram to the right provides an overview of the structure, click on the thumbnail to view a larger image.

The structure of material in a course in the wiki makes the course, theme, module and step concepts discussed in the Course Development document explicit:

• The Course page in a given course namespace is the root of the material. It contains a link to the CourseData page and to pages containing other course resources. With the exception of the CourseData page, none of the contents of the Course page, or the contents of pages linked from it, will be exported by the wiki2course script.
• The CourseData page contains links to all of the themes in the course, a link to the media list page, and the course metadata.
• Each theme page contains links to pages for each of the modules in the theme, and the theme's metadata.
• Each module page contains a series of steps; the 'meat' of the content of your course.

The presence of distinct Course and CourseData pages can cause some confusion, especially as it would seem that they could be combined. The division is primarily for readability and administrative simplicity: the Course page is intended to contain links to not only your course material, but any supporting material you wish to upload; the CourseData page only contains data, and links to other pages, that will be exported and processed into a standalone course package.

Complete specifications for the various pages that form a course can be found on:

• Course Page Specification
• Course Navigation
• CourseData Page Specification
• Media Page Specification
• Theme Page Specification
• Module Page Specification