I did not put my Intro to Performance courses up on the web at all this semester but plan on doing so in the spring. I want to mostly have a place to put assignment guides, calendar, sections of play scripts, and occasional announcements. Given the nature of the course, I don’t need to have my students do a whole lot in a digital fashion.
I’m currently trying to decide if I’m going to roll my own solution using WordPress (a platform I’m rather comfortable with) and Google Calendar or go through the university’s Blackboard installation which will probably have lots of tools that I don’t end up using and which is closed, proprietary, and not the best in terms of user experience. However, I haven’t used it in a number of years, so I don’t have a good handle on how BB has changed over the past decade. Part of me wonders, however, if a lot of other classes use it, the irksome elements might be worth it so that the students can have a centralized experience with their coursework.
Anyone have thoughts on the matter? I’d like to work on putting everything together over the winter break, so I want to make a choice soon.
One important factor to consider is how often your students will visit whatever course management set-up you use. The big advantage of using the university-sanctioned option (whatever it may be) is that your students might already be in the habit of using it daily. I find that online course management tools work so much better when students visit every day, since then I can post daily messages (if needed) and know that the majority of the students will see them. Asking your students to check a different web page could result in your students checking it infrequently. (And yes, they could just RSS it, but how many of the current generation of college students use RSS feeds? I really don’t know. All I see them doing is texting and using facebook.)
Yeah – that was one of my thoughts as well. I think I’m going to ask my current students what they do and how they use the Blackboard system and if there are things about that system that get in the way of their using it regularly or not.
As to RSS – I know, right? So few people seem to be even aware of it. When I went off Facebook I’d even set up a Friendfeed RSS that pulled from all of my different places across the web to feed everything into one stream. A fairly large number of my friends then just stopped reading my blogs since they didn’t show up on their Facebook wall. My probably is keeping myself from subscribing to too many feeds! Going to actual websites? I mean that’s just so 90s.