Editor's Note: I broke this out of the other discussion. Alex's original
questions is repeated for reference. -  TG

Quoth Waid, Alexander Ph.D.:

>Howdy,
>         I was wondering what procedures different schools follow to 
> update personal or course pages on thei campus or department 
> servers?  I'm interested in Military Academies in particular, but also in 
> general.  What I mean is, do you:
>
>a) make changes to the pages and save directly to the campus (or local) 
>server?
>b) make changes locally and then FTP them to the server?
>c) make changes to pages and put in a workorder for IS to handle for you?
>d) not have permission to put anything on the campus server?
>e) make changes to a development server that synchronizes to the live 
>server? (if so, does it synch immediately and automatically or do you have 
>to prompt the action somehow?)
>
>f) something else entirely?
Dear Alex,
For us in Humanities at UCLA, we deal with things differently depending on
whether it's (a) course sites, or (b) personal or departmental websites.

A. course sites:
Our policy is to encourage the building of content into the sites in
whatever way the instructor prefers, so many of them still send files, etc.
to us to add to their sites, while others (more a minority still) will add
things to their course sites themselves.

B. Departmental websites:
At present, we are in flux. We have been building/redesigning dept. websites
on a rotating basis as they request significant changes to layout, etc.
Depending on the department, either they have a designated webmaster to make
updates/maintain the site, or they parse it out to a combination of willing
grad students/instructors and/or some of our staff. We are now looking into
using content management system (e.g. OpenCMS, Plone). If we go that route,
we will still probably have to invest our own staff time in
creating/redesigning the template for the department in the CMS, but the
change will (hopefully) be in the area of maintenance/update of the site:
the CMS will hopefully make it easier for members of departments themselves
to upload changes, new content, etc.

C. Personal and conference/event websites:
We often get asked, and sometimes agree, to help a faculty member with one
of these types of sites. We really don't have the staff to do this globally,
and more often have to limit our offer to teaching them Dreamweaver/HTML and
getting tehm up to speed to do it themselves. This is offputting to many,
and not an ideal situation. The faculty are really unsupported by the
university in this area, as far as I can tell.

Feel free to ask more direct questions, if you have them.
Sincerely,
Annelie

--
Annelie Chapman, Ph.D.
Instructional Technology Coordinator
UCLA Ctr for Digital Humanities (CDH)
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*************

Alex:

Here at Yale we have committed to using Sakai, a community source learning 
management system (http://sakaiproject.org/). Instructors (or course 
leaders) are given appropriate ownership permissions to the appropriate 
course instances on it and can do whatever needs to be done, short of rare 
eccentric requests. Changes made to instances (e.g. syllabi, resources, 
announcements) are immediately available. However, instructors are allowed 
to create resource links to webpages, which may be their department-created 
site. These are handled on a per-department basis (natch) and likely cover 
5 of the 7 methods you set forth.

Students' personal page workflow is up to the students. They are allowed a 
certain amount of space on a university server, and make changes to those 
pages in the manner they see fit. Instructors' personal pages are, again, 
mostly on a per-department basis. Unless the instructor wants a personal 
page on the university servers, which only requires registration.

Best,
Trip


Trip Kirkpatrick
SysAdmin / Sr. Programmer
Center for Language Study

e: [log in to unmask]
w: http://www.cls.yale.edu/ 

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