The profile tool allows users to create a profile of themselves including photos, addresses, etc. The user has the choice to make information public. I won’t show you my personal profile as a figure—suffice it to say that the profile involves a lot of Photoshop manipulation and lying about my ability to climb large buildings in funny costumes. The membership tool allows users to join or un-join sites that instructors have made public. In the current scenario, admin will create the site and add the student and instructor; therefore, this tool is not strictly required for this article.

The student has the power to create schedules and view global announcements. The resources section enables the uploading of files via either a web form or Webdav. Dragging and dropping from local folders to the server via Webdav is a feature that students tend to love, but does occasionally have glitches.

Creating the site

First, login as admin and visit the “My workspace” sites tool. Ignore all the links to sites that you do not recognize. The other sites are part of the default setup of the application (perhaps the GUI designers should hide the extras from the view of newbie administrators). Clicking on the link “New Site” will send you to a site edit form as shown in figure 8. Add the details as shown in the figure. Leave any undefined elements as default. Notice that thanks to your actions the application published the site: now anyone can join with the role named access. The system designers intended the access role to give students, project workers access to a site, but limit the students’ powers to modify the site. In comparison, a second possible choice: the maintainer’s role contains more powers and is designed for use by those in charge of the project for example a teacher or instructor.

Figure 8: Creation of my first site

Setting the site’s permissions

Next, you should visit the Worksite setup tool; select the tick box on the site ID “cooking_101” and modify the site by clicking on the edit link (figure 9).

Figure 9: The worksite tool for the administrator

A quick aside: The instructor will be given the maintain role on the cookbook site, which will give him or her local site-wide administrative powers. When the instructor logs in, clicks on the site (in this case “basics of Cooking”) and then chooses the Worksite Setup tool, the instructor will see a lists of sites that are he or she can edit (figure 10).

Figure 10: Screen grab of the instructor’s worksite tool notice that the instructor is allowed to modify the cookbook_101 site

Click on edit for the given site in the worksite tool (as shown in figure 11); you will see many options: for example, the page order option allows you to change the order of the menu links on the left hand side.

Figure 11: Lots of options for site manipulation

It’s now time to give the instructor the maintenance role, and to give the student the correct access rights; therefore, click on the “Add Participants link”. Fill in the details as shown in figure 12. Notice that there is one ID per line in the text area box, and these are not comma delimited (which I sometimes fill in without thinking). Another point to note is that I have chosen the “Assign each participant a role individually” option which saves a little time later. Next press the ”continue” button.

Figure 12: Adding multiple participants

Select the correct roles by participant (figure 13) and then press continue. Next, you are offered an opportunity to send mail to the participants. Select “Don’t send …” as the email will go nowhere in the demo anyway.

Figure 13: Selecting the correct role per participant

Don’t get excited yet: if you logged in as a student and then visited the cookbook site, you will only see an unpublished site similar to figure 14. The reason for this is that the project site does not have tools associated with it yet.

Figure 14: A view of a typical unpublished site

Adding the tools as administrator or instructor is straightforward. After selecting the cookbook site as shown previously in figure 9, select the Edit tools link (figure 15) and select the blogger, chat room, discussion, podcasts, poll, resource, search, site info and wiki tools.

Figure 15: The edit tools dialog

Log out now as admin and log in as instructor. Enter the cookbook site and select the chat box tool. Notice that you can edit the permissions on the tool via a link at the top. Clicking on the link will display the permissions for instructor and students (maintain and access), figure 16.