[Editors] Posting course schedule to dept. site

Wed Jun 10 09:12:17 EDT 2015

So, is this data warehouse feed available to all of us? can you tell us whom we contact at Data Warehouse?

On Jun 10, 2015, at 9:01 AM, Rachel Traughber <rptraug at mit.edu<mailto:rptraug at mit.edu>> wrote:

Hello all,

I hesitated to send this because our new site hasn’t launched yet, but I think it would be helpful for a few of the problems that have come up on the listserv in the last few days.

Our new site uses an automated feed from the data warehouse to update course information by semester.  You can see the undergraduate section here: http://bcs-r1.mit.edu/academic-program/undergraduate/class-schedule We also do this for the graduate program.  Our academic staff will have access to add any notes on any specific course, but the actual listings are updated through their own database processes.

We also have automated feeds from the News Office, which appear on our homepage and the news section of our website.  We’ve included the tags they provide, as well, which will also be used on our new crowd sourced event calendar.

http://bcs-r1.mit.edu/news-events/news

I hope this helps anyone interested in looking at different ways to manage these materials.

All best,

Rachel

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Rachel Traughber
Senior BCS Communications | Development Assistant
MIT Dept of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
77 Massachusetts Avenue 46-2005
Cambridge, MA 02139
rptraug at mit.edu<mailto:rptraug at mit.edu>
617.452.2968
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From: editors-bounces at mit.edu<mailto:editors-bounces at mit.edu> [mailto:editors-bounces at mit.edu] On Behalf Of William T. G. Litant
Sent: Wednesday, June 10, 2015 8:51 AM
To: engineering-communicators; editors
Subject: Re: [Editors] Posting course schedule to dept. site

Nick did a terrific job setting this up. In the past, I had to fuss with a Word table sent to me by our student services office, migrating it to html, and then cleaning it up. Now, I can simply run Course 16 via Nick’s generator, scrape the html, and embed it in our site. Great time saver, and will look a lot better. Ideally, I’d like a real-time feed from the Registrar so I don’t have to do periodic updates as rooms/times change during the term, but this is the next best thing. Thanks Nick!

Bill

William Litant
communications director
Aeronautics and Astronautics Department
33-240
Mass. Institute of Technology
77 Massachusetts Ave.
Cambridge, MA 02139 USA
617-253-1564

On Jun 9, 2015, at 5:14 PM, Nick Holden <nholden at mit.edu<mailto:nholden at mit.edu>> wrote:

Hi all,

I took a stab at solving Bill’s issue below. If anyone else is looking for an easy way to gather information from the MIT Course Catalog for your websites, I built this app that will generate an HTML table with information about classes for a given course and term<http://mitcourses.herokuapp.com/>.

Let me know if you encounter any issues or if you’d find it useful to have this data in another format (RSS?).

Best,
Nick

Nick Holden
Communications and Alumni Coordinator
Office of Engineering Outreach Programs
MIT School of Engineering
617-324-9624 | nholden at mit.edu<mailto:nholden at mit.edu> | http://oeop.mit.edu<http://oeop.mit.edu/>

On May 27, 2015, at 2:21 PM, William T. G. Litant <wlitant at mit.edu<mailto:wlitant at mit.edu>> wrote:

Dear all:

Fighting my biannual battle posting our course schedule and have a question for you folks.

Currently, I receive the schedule from our department undergrad coordinator in the form of a .docx table. Yes, far from ideal. I then save as html, clean up the html, and embed in our site in the Drupal code for the page. http://aeroastro.mit.edu/academics/subject-information/current-schedule It makes for an ugly posting, the Word>html conversion is wonky, and it takes me too much time, but I’m not going to retype the whole thing. Ideally, I’d love to have a Drupal module that scrapes the same data (course, units, level, title, etc but NOT course description) from the Course Catalogue and creates/updates itself. Do any of you have anything like this or at least a more effective way for me to post this and update with minimal time spent? Thanks for any thoughts.

Best,
Bill

William Litant
communications director
Aeronautics and Astronautics Department
33-240
Mass. Institute of Technology
77 Massachusetts Ave.
Cambridge, MA 02139 USA
617-253-1564

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