After logging in to MarkUs as an Admin, you will be directed to the MarkUs Administration home page.
If you navigate away from the Administration Page and wish to return, click on the "Administration" tab found in the header.
Note: Ensure that you are viewing MarkUs as an admin and have not switched roles. Otherwise, you will be unable to access the "Administration" tab.
From the MarkUs Administration home page, you can view a list of dashboards. These dashboards are provided using third party ruby gems that allow for quick and easy monitoring of what is happening in MarkUs.
The Resque dashboard allows you to easily monitor monitor queues, jobs, and workers for MarkUs' background jobs. To access this dashboard click on the Resque dashboard link.
This tool allows you to monitor the status of each worker, display information about any delayed/failed jobs, monitor queues and view configurations for Resque. This dashboard is included from the Resque gem. For more information about this tool, please see the Resque homepage.
The Rails Performance dashboard allows you to monitor and visualize information regarding request traffic and MarkUs' response times. To enable this dashboard, in the MarkUs settings yaml file ensure you set the enabled setting under rails_performance to true. Once you have confirmed the MarkUs server was started with this setting enabled, log in to the MarkUs Administration home page. You will see a link to the Rails Performance dashboard.
This tool allows you to monitor and visualize information surrounding each request that is made to MarkUs. You can view the time it took for MarkUs to respond to each request, how many requests per minute MarkUs recieves, any 500 errors that occurred and the most common requests MarkUs recieves. This dashboard is currently supported through the rails_performance gem. For more information about what you can access see the Rails Performance homepage.
To manage courses, navigate to the "Courses" sub tab on the MarkUs Administration Page.
This will take you to a page that lists all the courses of this particular MarkUs instance. From this page, you can view and manage information about each course.
In order to access a specific course you may do so by navigating to the list of all courses and clicking on the course's associated "Go to Course" action.
Doing so will take you to the course's dashboard page where you can view and access the course as if you were an instructor. This is accomplished by giving you an "AdminRole" for the course. This role is created automatically for you when you try and access a course via the UI for the first time. If you wish to create, view or update this role manually, please see the relevant API documentation.
🗒️ NOTE: Only you have the ability to view and access the Admin role. Instructors cannot see that you have this role when using either the UI or API.
In order to create a course, click on the "Create Course" link located at the top right corner of the page.
This will redirect you to a page where you can specify the following course properties:
- Name: The name or course code for this course. Please ensure this is correct before creating the course as this cannot be edited later.
- Display Name: A longer course name or title for users to see.
- Autotester URL: A URL that points to the API of a running Automated Tester instance. Setting this will enable automated testing for this course. To disable automated testing, set this to the empty string.
- Maximum File Size (bytes): The maximum file size (in bytes) that users are allowed to upload to MarkUs.
- Course Visibility: Selecting "hidden" will hide the course from students in a course. Graders and instructors for the course can still see and manage the course as usual.
After clicking "Save", the course will be created and you will be taken back to the list of all courses.
If you later wish to modify the properties of a course you can reach any course's edit page by going to the list of all courses and clicking on the "edit" action of the course you wish to modify.
From the edit page of a course you can modify the "Display Name" and "Course Visibility" properties specified when creating the course. Due to internal referencing, the "Name" property cannot be edited after the course is created.
If an Autotester URL has been set for this course, two additional buttons will be available:
- Test Connection: Clicking this button will check if the current course can connect to the automated tester at the given URL. The result will be reported as a flash message at the top of the page.
- Refresh Settings: Clicking this button will resend all automated test settings (for each assignment) to the autotester and get an updated schema (contains information about which testers are available and the options for each one). This is useful if the automated tester has been reset or updated but the url has not changed.
As with courses, to manage users, navigate to the "Users" sub tab on the MarkUs Administration Page.
This will take you to a page that lists data about every admin and end user.
In order to create a new user, click on the "Create User" link located at the top right corner of the page.
This will redirect you to a page where you can specify the following user information:
- User Name: The username alias for this user.
- First Name: This user's first name.
- Last Name: This user's last name.
- ID Number: This user's id number (optional).
- Email: This user's email address (optional).
- Type: A user can either be an "Admin User" or an "End User". In most cases, you will likely want to create an "End User". "End Users" are regular users who can later be specified as an "Instructor", "TA", or "Student" for a particular course. "Admin Users" have the ability to manage MarkUs and view all courses as if they were instructors. Be sure to only give an Admin User account to trusted users.
Clicking the "Save" button will create the user and take you back to the list of all users.
If you later wish to modify any properties of a user, you may do so by navigating to the list of users on the MarkUs Administration Page and clicking on the "edit" action of the user you wish to modify.
This will take you to the user's edit page, where you can update the same properties specified when creating a user.
If you plan on creating many end users, you may find it convenient to instead upload a list of users for markus to create. To do this, click on the "Upload End Users" link located at the top right corner of the page.
This will open a modal where you can upload a CSV file containing a list of all the end users you wish to upload and create.
This CSV file must have the following fields (note that these are listed in the order they must appear in the CSV file):
- User Name: The username alias for this end user (cannot be blank).
- Last Name: This end user's last name (cannot be blank).
- First Name: This end user's first name (cannot be blank).
- ID Number: This end user's id number (optional).
- Email: This end user's email address (optional).
Hence, an example End User CSV file would look like:
username_1,last_name_1,first_name_1,id_number_1,email_1
username_2,last_name_2,first_name_2,id_number_2,email_2
username_3,last_name_3,first_name_3,id_number_3,email_3
After you have selected a file to upload, click on the "Upload" button on the modal. MarkUs will then create End Users from the list of users you provided. The users administration page will be refreshed after all users.
🗒️ Note:
- Only CSV files are currently supported with this feature.
- Any errors such as a missing username, first name or last name will result in the entire upload to fail.
- If a user has already been created and their corresponding username is listed in the CSV file, this feature will update their information with data from the CSV file.