Courses have students and one or more teachers. Teachers are assigned by the administrator. The teachers obtain an enrollment token (visible in course details), which they distribute to their students (outside Owl). Everybody with a CAS account can log in, enter the token and (s)he will be automatically added to the course. If you need access for anybody who does not have a CAS account, please ask the administrator.
Each course consists of a sequence of topics. There are the following types of topics:
Each topic also has:
For every pair of a task and a student, there is a thread corresponding to discussion between the student and the teacher about the task. The thread consists of a sequence of posts. A post can contain:
Students can post only in their threads. Teachers can also create global posts which are visible in all threads for the given task.
Typically, a thread is started by a teacher posting the task statement globally. Then the student posts a solution and all other posts will be private. Global posts can be also used for hints and additional clarification of the task statement.
Students are allowed to post after the task's deadline, but all such posts are shown with a warning.
Discussion topics have only a single thread and both teachers' and students' posts are global.
In the list of topics: Green topics contain new posts. For a post to become old, it must be explicitly acknowledged or replied to.
In the list of posts in a thread: New posts have green border. Global posts have green background. Private posts by a teacher have blue background.
In the "Teacher's summary" table, each cell corresponds to a thread. Green threads have new posts. For courses with multiple teachers, threads with new posts, where the last one was posted by another teacher, are colored blue.
The Owl allows grading of solutions by other students. A course must be specifically configured to allow that (ask the admin if you want).
For each task, selected students can be made graders. The graders have access to threads of all students of the same course. They can post replies and assign points. The teachers can override their decision if needed.
If you want to run your own instance of the Owl, or just peek under the hood, there is a public Git repository.