Online Course
Posted on May 14, 2007
Filed Under Blogging, Philosophy, Teaching |
I’ve been racing to finish getting my Understanding Vietnam course ready for its wholly online launch in a week. I have thirteen students signed up, which is a good number, I think. As I have mentioned here before, the university is using the Blackboard “learning system” for its new online courses & while I am now familiar enough with the software that getting around inside it is no longer a problem, I continue to have philosophical & pedagogical problems with the system. It is proprietary, which in my view sucks. Software improves when it has a community of developers, as in the open source model. But the main problem is that Blackboard consists of a set of pre-defined categories that presume the developers know what the educational dynamic is about. This causes what I’d call a registration problem — you know, when the various layers of a printed image don’t quite match up, leaving blurry edges of weird colors. I’d rather have a blank sheet, something much more like a blog. Now, given what I’ve just written, this is ironic: I’m using weekly Powerpoint slide shows in place of lectures for this course. (I would have liked to use something like Demo Builder, which I played around with & which creates svn / Flash files, but the learning curve & the fact that I’m working on an ancient laptop* made this too big of an undertaking for this first all-online version of the course.) I feel very comfortable in Powerpoint, actually. I try to follow Tufte’s rules, but given that the course is completely online, I’m using more text than I would if the slides were coming up behind me as I lectured in a classroom. Powerpoint, in user look & feel is closer to blogging than Blackboard. (He chuckles ruefully.)
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*The university is getting me a new machine, but the funds don’t become available until July 1st, about two-thirds of the way through my summer course & way too late for this development phase in any case.
Comments
4 Responses to “Online Course”
Stumble it!
Have you (or Clarkson) checked out Moodle? A fully open-source platform with a few developers on board to extend it might give you a lot more flexibility…
I’ve heard of it, Larry. The problem is “a few developers on board.” Clarkson is a historically a “tech school” but we have a strange aversion to open source, bottom up systems. I wish it weren’t so,
Today at Tacoma Public Library we did The King’s English, as I mentioned in an earlier comment. I brought in a print-out of the blog entry - Ashbery. The five found it interesting. When we closed the group for the summer I was added a favorite novel to a list - Borderliners, by Peter Hoeg, about post-world-war-two students at what was once a Grundtvigian folk school. Grundtvigian teaching philosophy directs a lot to the students aloud.
[...] second week (of eight) of my online course begins today. Things are going well both logistically and in terms of learning, I think. My own [...]