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Technical Specifications

This page describes the technical specifications of Courses. The section Content Creation covers general use and content creation, for which knowledge of the technical specifications is not required.

Structure

The Courses platform consists of several parts:

courses architecture simple en
Figure 1. Structure of the Courses platform, consisting of the Main page and individual course pages.

Home Page

The Home Page is located at the homepage.[1] It allows the following:

  • Searching among courses.
  • Displays courses that the user is taking or teaching.
  • Displays a summary of the most important information from linked systems such as Fittable or Grades in one place.
  • Displays the latest news for individual courses, which teachers can share via the News component.

For course pages that do not use Courses to publish study materials, it ensures redirection from the search results to their home page (e.g., to the Moodle system).

Signpost Settings

Course guarantors can specify the following parameters for their course within the Courses signpost:

  • Preferred platform for publishing course materials (Courses or Moodle).
  • Preferred platform for grading (Grades, Progtest, or Moodle).
  • Whether to merge all course sections into a single course page or whether each section should have its own page.

A request to change these settings can be made by creating a ticket at the ICT department’s helpdesk system.

Course Pages

From the perspective of individual course pages, the Courses platform is an implementation of the more universal PagesFIT system, which is used for the general creation and publication of static HTML pages.

Courses uses its own content generator to create the resulting HTML – the Course Pages Generator. This generator converts files in supported formats into the final HTML format as seen on individual course pages (see https://courses.fit.cvut.cz/).[2]

courses architecture fitpages en
Figure 2. PagesFIT - A simplified diagram showing the generation of the final HTML from source repositories.

PagesFIT in addition to the actual generation, also handles fully automated publishing to an HTTP(S) server, login management using SSO, permissions, etc.

  1. Link to the repository https://gitlab.fit.cvut.cz/course-pages/signpost-app ↩
  2. Using the Course Pages Generator is essential when creating a course on the Courses platform. Due to configuration dependencies, it is not possible to use third-party content generators within Courses. ↩