Current Students
Electronic Resources
CourseInfo Tips
Accessing Course Info
- Go to: http://courseinfo.bu.edu/ Or look on the www.bu.edu website's right hand list of 'Features,' and select 'CourseInfo and WebCT'.**
- A dialog box appears with several semesters listed. Click on the semester of interest.
- A list of schools appears. Scroll down and click on 'School of Social Work.'
- A list of courses appears. Find your class. (Note, each course begins with a two-letter code which refers to the department which offers it: HB for Human Behavior, CP for Clinical Practice, SR for Social Research, WP for Welfare Policy.)
- You are prompted to enter your login name and Kerberos password. You are now in to CourseInfo for your class.
Using Course Info: to find your class syllabus, etc.
Select 'Course Documents' from the list along the left side of the page for access to your syllabus.
- There may be more than one file within the Course Documents if more than one professor is teaching the course. Select the appropriate file.
- If there is no syllabus check 'Announcement.'
The 'Communication Center' has some interesting features used in some classes.
Problems in Course Info
- If you get the message: 'Access Denied' it could be because the professor has not yet added your name to the list of students to whom s/he has given access to the CourseInfo system.
- If you thought you printed your syllabus but got a blank page see "Pits and Snares."
Pits & Snares
"Not all toolbars* are created equal."
Sadly (but all too commonly) you go to pick up the syllabi and articles you printed and…
- The Printing Center attendant tells you that you have no print out at all.
- The Printing Center attendant hands you a lovely stack of blank paper.
It is very easy to send gobs of print jobs to the Printing Center in the basement of 111 Cummington Street, the belly of IT, only to discover, an hour before you needed them, that you have…nothing. What happened? The same thing can happen when you save your readings. You go to retrieve them the night before class…and they're not there! You Fell Into the Trap of the inequality of toolbars*.
Printing from the correct toolbar
Why do toolbars matter? They are where you find the 'Print File' function. (It's either one written out in words or one that uses a picture of a printer). When you call up a document in CourseInfo or the Mugar on-line course reserve service, you have two toolbars to choose from. One toolbar is at the top of the screen (the web browser's toolbar). The other is within a box created by a program like Adobe, for instance, that displays the document you want. This box has its own toolbar. Use this one to print.
Not all toolbars have print functions on them!
You discover you are looking at a document you want to print whose toolbar has no print function. Take a deep breath and close the document or hit 'Back' to return to the page in 'Course Documents' that shows the link for the document you want.
- Click on the link, but instead of opening it; select 'Save' to save the document on the hard drive. If you are at a public computer you can save it there temporarily.
- Open the document from its saved location and print it. (Consider buying a thumb drive to save on to. This is not an endorsement, but Radio Shack is across the street from Marsh Chapel.) Suggestion: tie your thumb drive to your keychain or backpack. Thumb drives are very easy to leave behind, with sanity-destroying consequences.
[footnote[[ * What is a toolbar? A place where hammers get hammered?
First of all, there is no shame in not knowing what a toolbar is. A toolbar consists of rows of words and icons that appear at the top of a program's window. In Microsoft Word, for instance, the toolbar starts with 'File' followed by 'Edit' then 'View' with 'Insert' following that, etc. Each, when selected, allows you to choose a function from a drop-down menu. (File leads 'Print'). There are also rows of little icons in the toolbar (of which the little printer picture or the disk picture that saves your document, is our concern in the context of this topic; "Pits and Snares"). ]]]
A few more words on Printing.
BU graduate students are entitled to the equivalent of $225 of printing per year. That translates into about 2,000 pages. It is possible to exceed this limit, especially if as a work-study student your professor asks you to print out documents.
Where to print stuff:
- The basement of the IT building (111 Cummington St.) is often the easiest place to handle a large volume of documents.
- The basement of the SSW building is where you'll find printers closest to your classrooms. (This is handy when finishing papers.)
- The Mugar Library has two sets of printers. One set is run from the computers that are tended by IT and have MS Word on them. The other set do not, are tended by the Library, and if you print from them you pay 10 cents a page with a card you get from a machine in the library. These computers do not have MS Word. You can print off MS Word documents, but you cannot edit them.
Checking your print quota
Nothing's worse than going to print out that final paper minutes before class and finding you can't because you have exceeded your quota… yes, it has happened. So check how many pages you have left in your quota at…www.bu.edu/computing/myacs
Adding pages to your quota
- You can e-mail a request to add additional pages by going to www.bu.edu/computing/myacs
- You can get more pages added to your print quota by going to the IT Office on the ground floor of 111 Cummington St.
