WikiCourseTemplates

Hopefully this page will grow to be an index of examples and suggestions of best practices for putting course material up on this wiki.

Per-semester Course Updates

What's this?

The wiki allows on-the-fly updates to material, but sometimes you may want to make major changes for a new semester (for example replace the operating system used in your course) and in that case you want to keep the old version of the course for reference or in case you want to go back to it.

How to Do It

Let's say you have a course page called ABC123_Subject1 which contains the material for one week of your course. I would avoid putting the week number or lecture number into the name of the page, in case you decide to move it into another week in a subsequent semester.

To create that page simply go to the URL http://zenit.senecac.on.ca/wiki/index.php/ABC123_Subject1 and click "edit this page". But don't add your content in there yet.

After you do that you'll be able to make a link to that page by writing [[ABC123_Subject1]] in another page. Since I've done it already for this course, here's what it looks like: ABC123_Subject1

So far we've gone through the normal wiki process for creating a page. Here's where we'll do something different. Instead of adding your content to ABC123_Subject1 - we'll make that page redirect. The idea is that [[ABC123_Subject1]] will redirect to whatever the current version of Subject1 is.

Now you'll have to decide how to separate the different versions of the material. Some suggestions are:

• Make a new version every semester, whether there are major updates or not. This may be quite a bit of extra work because you'll have to create a new version of every page in your course every semester.
• Make a new version every time there's a major update to the subject for that page. This is much less work than the option above, but you risk forgetting what older versions are available, especially if you don't use numbers for the versions. This is what I do, and I'll explain below how I deal with that problem.

Now you're almost ready to put your content up. Create a new page with a name based on your "index" page. In my example I will make [[ABC123_Subject1]] redirect to [[ABC123_Subject1_-_Technology1]] - this because I will version my subject pages based on the technology I'm using that semester.

To create the redirect: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Redirects#Creating_a_redirect

New Subject Material Workflow

Let's walk through what happens when I want to create another version of the Subject1 page because I update the technology that's used for it. Continuing the example above, I will want the page ABC123_Subject1 to redirect to ABC123_Subject1_Technology3 instead of ABC123_Subject1_Technology2

1. Create the new page ABC123_Subject1_-_Technology3 and populate it with content.
2. Go to the redirect page you created, ABC123_Subject1. This will redirect you to another page but it will say (Redirected from ABC123 Subject1) at the top, which you can click on.
3. Edit the redirect page and make it redirect to the new page ABC123_Subject1_-_Technology3 instead of the old ABC123_Subject1_-_Technology1

Note that the redirect page will keep a history of all the edits, so if you click on history you can find a list of all the versions of that subject page that you've ever had.