All CS courses have a profile page which provides basic information about the course. Most also have a separate website with much more extensive information for students taking the class.
Course Profiles
Our course profiles reflect a nightly scrape of Courses@Brown. To the information from C@B, they add links to instructors and to course websites. Members of each course's TA groups are able to make changes to some course profile information, such as the URL of the course's website. To make those changes:
- Log into the website
- Navigate to the course profile
- Look for the "Course" pulldown in the djangoCMS toolbar at the top
- Select the semester you wish to edit
- Edit the profile in-browser
Course Websites
Many CS courses have a website independent of Brown's Canvas system. These sites are often inherited from the work of TAs in past semesters.
Note that you can link to a course website from your Course Profile. See the instructions in the previous section.
Static Sites
Course sites rendered into HTML can be placed on the CS Department filesystem and immediately served to the internet. How you do this is entirely up to you. You could use a static site generator, for instance. Contact the technical staff to get the location and permissions you'll need.
Git Pages
Git Pages is a local clone of GitHub Pages, a popular system that combines the convenience of the git revision control system with a static site generator backend. Git Pages was designed to bring that convenience to course site creation and maintenance.
Virtual Machines
Virtual machines are available for course needs. In most cases, they are overkill for a purely informational site, and they do require a much more system administration and maintenance than a simple static site.
Offsite Hosting
We don't recommend hosting your site outside of Brown. There are issues of data privacy, security, system administration, accounts and payments. Course sites need to be passed along from semester to semester and year to year.
