Blogging: The Solution to (most) of Your Classroom Needs
I was talking to a couple of professors yesterday who were teaching online classes this summer in a pilot program. To say the least, they were having a great deal of trouble using the technology. Now I didn’t look at it a long time, but it struck me how clunky, un-userfriendly, and awkward the program was (I think it was designed by WebCT of Blackboard). It seemed as if everything required 42 clicks to do. I said to those professors, as I have said here before, “have you considered using a blog? I think it could do everything you want, and much easier.” Now in this case it is not possible as they are a) part of a pilot program looking at using this system (”ohh please someone stop them before they do this”) b) they need a chat system (so you would need something to supplement the blog. It still astounds me that Universities are willing to pay 10’s in some cases 100’s of thousands of dollars for educational software that frustrates students and educators. Seems to me a better choice to hire a few staff with that money that could train faculty how to use the many free resources that are already out there.
I know, I know, I keep promising to do a long post on how to set up a blog for using in the classroom, a sort of ground-up to complicated tricks how-to. But for now I am not teaching a class, and I am sort of waiting to have one I am working on to walk through. In the meantime though check out edublogs’s tutorials. They have four brief, but thorough tutorials on the mechanics of setting up a blog for your classroom. And while you are at it you might give a listen to James Farmer’s presentation on online learning. James is the guru behind edublogs, and is incredible insightful when it comes to these matters. I don’t agree with some of what he says here, but he definitely sets us in the right direction.
June 10th, 2007 at 1:19 am
Thanks for the nice words and pointers - the presentation was for a keynote and so deliberate in it’s attempts to stir up discussion (noone wants to listen to balanced arguments for 50 minutes do they
To be honest I’m not so concerned that Unis won’t use free services but that they won’t invest in simple, effective and customisable OS solutions, but are happier throwing hundreds of thousands at cumbersome, shoddy, managerial driven solutions.
June 10th, 2007 at 11:58 pm
I so agree with you about the clunkiness of cms’s and am constantly frustrated by my own university’s continued investment in a system that doesn’t really meet people’s needs. I, too, would rather see that money go into staff to develop or customized software that’s useful and easy to use. I, myself, use blogs whenever I teach and IM for virtual conferences. I have used the cms only for administrative tasks–grading, collecting papers, storing copyrighted materials. It seems there must be a system that’s cheaper and does the administrative tasks much more simply.
June 11th, 2007 at 1:39 pm
I suggest that schools stop investing so much money in monopolizing companies such as Blackboard. (Simple economics says that they can charge so much money because they think they are the only one and the schools will pay it.) There are other CMS/LMS out there that are much less expensive, far more easy to use, and have all the features schools need.
I recommend a good look at Scholar360. It offers all the academic features professors and student need, along with a social networking feature that student love!
Cathy
P.S.: Many universities pay well over a million dollars for Blackboard before all is said and done. There are plenty of LMS/CMS under 10K.
July 9th, 2007 at 11:31 am
[...] Using a blog as a course website. [...]
October 13th, 2007 at 9:51 pm
Oh, yes. I agree.
At my university our online system for course managment is absolutely frustration. Clickety-click, trouble, impossible to use, littered with features noone uses.
Now I hear they are implementing wikis into the system. Wikis! Listen: The people that want to create and maintain a wiki would probably know how to put up a wiki themselves. Why not make the basics work? Then let people figure out solutions for their advanced needs themselves.