How I’ll try to manage courses Fall 2008
August 1, 2008
Spring 08 I tried using this blog to manage courses. Semi-painless semi-flop. Too many static pages, which will only grow worse and worse over time. It would be great if I could use webCT, since that is supposedly designed for the task. But I find the interface so awful I will only use webCT for material that needs to have access restricted to a specific class. Static web pages had the growth problem — the archive is a mess. I’m not going to try to roll my own. So this time around I’ll rely more on the wiki. Here are the hopes:
- The interface is decent.
- Students can watch a page, so they can get email when things change. SHould help with “keep up” — maybe better than an RSS feed here.
- Part of the role of the wiki is archiving communal knowledge. As it pertains to a course, that iterates over semesters, the wiki seems to make sense. There will be an end-of-semester winnowing burden; separating the parts that need to persist from parts that need to be archived.
- Archiving may be manageable. Wikis hold lots of static pages. The course article can link to its own archive kind of naturally.
- Heavier use of the wiki for courses may promote use of the wiki, which is something we want to see happen.
Wonder what the approach will be next time…