Faculty Teaching Materials

Teaching materials include PowerPoint presentations, PDF documents, assignments, tutorial questions and answers, past examinations, multimedia files and data files that are of use in undergraduate or postgraduate teaching activities.

Method of Delivery

Teaching materials can be delivered to students in three separate ways.  These are outlined below:

A. Faculty Teaching Pages

Web pages are hosted on the web server teaching.fec.anu.edu.au which is co-located with the EcoComm website.

When a new course is created, a directory is put in place which has a default template.  School Administrators or individual staff customise the material presented on this website to reflect the requirements of the course.

This layout is very simple and straightforward for the students to understand and allows considerable flexibility in the layout of the pages within the ANU web template standards.  The material is also cross-referenced with information about lecturers, timetables and course outlines.

One issue of concern is that there is very little protection against non-enrolled students downloading course materials.  One way around this problem is to make PDF documents and protect these with a password.

B. WebCT Teaching Pages

WebCT is supported by the Scholarly Technology Services section of the Division of Information.  WebCT is an integrated product designed to support teaching. 

Feature of WebCT include restriction of access to enrolled students, consistency of presentation for students regardless of the school or faculty offering the course and a number of interactive features such as noticeboards and discussion lists.

One issue of concern is that WebCT prevents students from browsing courses that they are considering taking - they can only access the material when they are enrolled in that course.  Honours and Graduate students taking undergraduate courses need to be manually enrolled by the course convenor.

The uploading process to make materials available to students is web based, allowing staff members to easily upload files.

C. The Oracle File Server

The Oracle is a legacy system from before the widespread uptake of web based delivery.  The Oracle is only accessible from on-campus.  No electronic navigation system is presented - students just see a directory of files.

There is no file protection from non-enrolled students available for files on The Oracle.

Which method?

Faculty IT supports both methods A and B, and discourages method C.

Generally, the Finance and Applied Statistics school mandates that method B be used for all teaching.

Economics and Business and Information Management Schools allow methods A or B to be used at the discretion of the individual academic.

Faculty IT must be informed of the decision that is made, as the Faculty website (ecocomm) must be updated to reflect changes of teaching material delivery.

Who maintains teaching notes pages?

Faculty IT is not involved in the maintenance of teaching notes pages.  We will not generally put up lecture notes unless a School Office is unattended and there is no other alternative method to get the teaching material uploaded.

Faculty IT will provide training to staff who need assistance in managing their own teaching notes pages.  Alternatively, staff can ask their School Administrators to do the conversion to PDF and uploading if they feel that they cannot do this on their own.

Refer to the Useful files for some templates that can be used in PowerPoint.

Refer to the Teaching Notes Guide for information about uploading lecture notes to the Faculty server.

If you do not have FrontPage or Distiller installed on your PC, please contact Faculty IT.

Standards

The following standards apply regardless of which method is chosen to deliver lecture notes.

1.  Written documents and PowerPoint slides should be converted to PDF format for ease of viewing.  Not all students have access to Word or Excel to view these documents.

2.  PowerPoint slides should be "printed" into PDF format as pure black and white, and with at least 3 slides per page.  Students dislike having to print out hundreds of pages of lecture notes.

3.  Where PDF documents are password protected, this password should be the same for all materials relating to the course for that semester.  This password should also be given to the School Administrator.

4.  Members of academic staff should be familiar with the ANU Copyright requirements when using material which is covered by copyright. 

5.  All material should include the words "AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY" and at least the name of the School or Faculty prominently displayed on the document.