The Courses Catalog, Timetable, and Programs of Study are the three primary documents that students use while on-campus. The Programs of Study contains graduation requirements, including lists of applicable courses. The Courses Catalog contains descriptions of courses available. The Timetable contains a list of classes available in a given term, including the time, location, and (when available) the name of the instructor. Thus, every semester, students must refer simultaneously to all three documents. It was felt that a hypertextually linked version of the three would be superior to the three paper documents separately. This section will show the features and implementation of the UIUC on-line registration materials [in 1996].
All of the course names in the Programs of Study are linked to further information about the course. For example, clicking on GE 221 takes the user to the course description, as seen in Figure 28. In addition to the brief summary of the course's content and hyperlinked prerequisites, there are links to schedule information.
Clicking on Fall '96, for example, gives the user a page with a list of all of the available sections, with the times, locations, and teachers of those sections, as seen in Figure 29. In addition to links back to the course description and to prerequisite classes, the class location and instructor are both linked. Clicking on the instructor pulls information about the instructor from the phonebook (ph) database, formats it nicely, and returns that information to the user. (Note that the ph database software predates my time at UIUC. Its discussion is outside the scope of this document.)
The class location is also linked. Clicking on 101 Transportation Building, for example, would bring the user to a page with the floorplan of the first floor of the Transportation Building, with room 101 circled. (See Figure 14, which differs only in the room that is circled.) This gives a complete entry into the navigational system described above.
The document needed to be broken into many pieces, with appropriate cross-links to other sections. This required human intervention. In a hypertext document, it is meaningless to leave the phrase, "For more information, see the Office of Minority Affairs on page 59." I know of no computer program intelligent enough to translate "page 59" into the appropriate URL, especially when there can be two sections on page 59.
The manual intervention was not necessarily a large enough problem to make it a job not worth doing. By the time that this project was undertaken, campus awareness of the World-Wide Web was high enough that all of the colleges had information available on the web. I felt that it was quite possible that future versions of the Programs of Study would derive from colleges' online information instead of the other way around. I developed this version of the Programs of Study for the colleges to build upon; whether or not this will actually happen might not be known until long after I have graduated.
There was a great deal, fortunately, that could be automated. All courses that were in a regular format (i.e. the department abbreviations and three-digit call number) were automatically hyperlinked to the course description. In addition, room numbers coupled with building names were recognized automatically and linked to be navigational system described above.
The prerequisite list contains names
of departments that are fully spelled out, not abbreviated. This
meant that I had to create a translation table to generate the
course abbreviations (used in the URLs for the class schedule pages,
as seen below).
Otherwise, it was straightforward to generate the HTML that
presented the course description in a fully hypertext fashion.
I then went to the Office of Facilities Planning and Management (OFPM) to attempt to
get an electronic version of all of the engineering and math course descriptions.
After some resistance on their part towards giving a document with some legal
weight to a complete unknown, they relented and gave me a plain-text section
of the Courses Catalog for engineering and math courses. I turned those
all into hypertext documents.
This turned out to be just a prototype. At the time that I
did this, I had no official standing, which made it difficult to get access to
good information. Thus, at the request of higher authorities,
I turned over my scripts to the Computing and Communications Services Office, to
Mike Grady.
As the paper version of the Courses Catalog is only
published on a two-year schedule, OFPM did not have any internal
mechanism for incremental changes. Working with Mike, they
instituted changes in the way they compiled the information so
that the online version of the Courses Catalog could be updated
more often than once every two years.
Mike also made some changes to the layout of the course description. He found
that there were certain combinations of browsers and operating systems that
would crash when confronted with very long documents. While the engineering
classes could all be printed in one file, the Music Department had so many classes
that they could not be listed on one page. An example of the course descriptions
as Mike rearranged them is in Figure 28.
Armed with this information, I could create am HTML document with
the same information but formatted more nicely, and with a link
to the course description.
At the same time that I turned the Courses Catalog script over to
Mike Grady, I gave him the script to parse the Timetable.
As he was a full-time, permanent employee of the Computing and Communications Services Office (CCSO), he could access
to the up-to-date database maintained by the University's administrative
computing department. Mike had to rewrite the scripts to deal with the
different input format, but access to the database allowed him
to create a new hypertext version every morning. For the first time,
students and faculty had access to current information instead
of a snapshot of the information as it stood on the day the Timetable
went to press. One area that had been particularly wanting was the instructor.
Most teaching assignments were made after the Timetable went to
press, so never made it into print. Now the teaching assignments are reflected
almost immediately in the on-line version.
In addition, enough information is in the database that Mike was able to
link the instructor to his or her ph entry. And, when I finished the
maps and floorplans segment of the navigational system, I suggested to Mike
how the Timetable could link to the navigational system. An example of
the final version of the on-line Timetable is in Figure 29.
Go up to Table of Contents
Courses Catalog
To prove the concept,
I typed in all of the course descriptions for the General Engineering
Department, copying them from the university document called the
Courses Catalog. The course descriptions looked like this:
221. Introduction to General Engineering Design. Fundamental
concepts in the analytical modelling, classical and computer-based
analysis and design of structural and machine components
and assemblies; external loads, internal forces and displacements
in statically determinate and indeterminate configurations;
kinematics of linkages, gears, and cams; static forces
in machines. Prerequisite: Theoretical and Applied Mechanics
212 and 221, and Computer Science 101.
3 hours.
At first glance, this does not look like machine-readable text. However,
further examination showed that there was actually great regularity in
the entries.
The first four characters are the three-digit course number and
a period. From there to the next period is the course title.
Until "Prerequisite:" is the course description, and from "Prerequisite:"
to the next period is the prerequisite list. After that is the
credit received for successful completion.Timetable
The Timetable information already existed online in a non-hypertext
format through the ph facility. The ph database could be
queried to
give information about classes in a format similar to the following:
----------------------------------------
name: music213 the history of music i
text: fall92
: prerequisite: music 110 or consent of instructor.
: required of all music students.
: 3 hours.
: 05929 lect 1 m w f 2100 music bld
: 05930 quiz a 1 tu th 1180 music bld
: 05931 quiz b 9 tu th 1144 music bld
: 05931 quiz b 9 tu th 1144 music bld
: 05932 quiz c 10 tu th 1148 music bld
: 05933 quiz d 9 w f 1184 music bld
: 05934 quiz e 11 w f 1148 music bld
: 05935 quiz f 4 tu th 1161 music bld
----------------------------------------
I was able to write a script that parsed the record, saving important
fields. The first word after "name:" is the department name and three-digit
course number. The rest of the line is the course title.
From "prerequisite:" to a period is a list of the prerequisites, with
all words that are followed by three digits being the department, and
the three-digit numbers being the associated course numbers.
After the period of the prerequisites, a
carriage return, and a colon is the credit given for the class.
The rest of the lines pertain to the class times and locations, and
are in a table based on column number.
Registration Materials Summary
Students now can examine all of the information they need to register from one
source instead of three. The access is free to the student, while the paper versions
of the
Courses Catalog and Programs of Study must be purchased.
The on-line information is more up-to-date than the paper documents. The
on-line versions also benefit from being tightly coupled to information about
the instructor and the navigational system.
Go on to Results
Go back to Navigation System Implementation
Kaitlin Duck Sherwood