One of the most active entries I've posted this year was my wish for a good open-source courseware package. I ended up looking at a few of the suggestions, but to get what I wanted, all would have required too steep a learning curve and customization process.
So, today I decided to see if I could leverage my existing knowledge of MovableType to generate something that met my basic needs for courseware. I plan on keeping the grades in our Prometheus-based courseware (saves me the hassle of dealing with password-protected stuff, and importing class lists), but putting everything else into a customized course blog. That allows me to make the course content easily accessible to students, colleagues, and other interested parties--and to allow comments and ideas from people outside of the class to become part of the
The beginnings of the course site can be found at http://www.it.rit.edu/~ell/320/320-031/. I've done nothing yet with aesthetics, obviously, because I wanted to first think through functionality.
I put in a fake due date for a paper, and post-dated it to September 25th. Unfortunately, that pushed the post-dated entry to the first page, which I didn't want.
I could have limited the categories on the first page, but MT doesn't support category exclusion. I thought about installing the ExcludeCategories plug-in, but decided that was too limiting in terms of functionality.
Instead, I installed Brad Choate's MTSQL plug-in, which is far more flexible in what it will allow me to do. I then replaced the <MTEntries> with a SQL-based tag to select only entries published today or within the past 15 days. There's probably a much more elegant way to do it than what I came up with, but it works:
<MTSQLEntries query="select entry_id from mt_entry where entry_created_on <= NOW() AND TO_DAYS(NOW()) - TO_DAYS(entry_created_on) <= 10 AND entry_blog_id = 9">
That fixed the problem of post-dated entries showing up "before their time."
Next, I added a bunch of categories, falling into two groups. The first group was structural categories--like "due dates," "assignments," and "readings." The second group was topical categories--like "HTML," "Unix," and "History."
Then I tweaked the calendar, so that all three months of the quarter would be displayed in calendar form, and only "due dates" would appear. (Though I'll probably change that to include a new category of "class topics" as well.) That allows students to click on a highlighted date to see what's due that day.
The main page will show all current entries, probably with the exception of due dates. It will include news, suggestions, discussion topics, resources, etc. Then there will be two category menus--one for each of the two sets of categories. Students can either see everything posted related to a topic (like HTML), or everything of a particular type (like assignments).
I'll start with comments turned for all entries by default, so that students can ask questions about specific posts. I'll also set MT up to email me with new comments, so that I know when there are questions.
I use wbct which is so clunky. Have you tried Groove? It has all the features that I need and that I suspect that you need as well.
I am going to try this next semester and see if we can get the class onto the free tool.
Isn't Groove commercial? And platform-specific? Both are a problem in my environment.
Looking at their site, the "scholar" package for course server use appears to cost $999. And the client appears to run on PCs only--not good when I'm primarily a Mac user, and the course in question is taught in a Mac lab. :)
This is a brilliant idea Liz. The chronological order and interactive features are so analogous to real class work. You may be setting some kind of educational precedent here.
I've been through a series of awful, clunky packages -- Web Crossings, when I first started teaching here; WebCT most recently -- but this summer my college hired an intern to start hooking interested faculty members up with Moodle (http://www.moodle.org), a pretty flexible and not unattractive web-based open source course management package. I've put together my fall classes in it, and though I obviously haven't taught them yet (and thus can't speak to the student experience), the prof experience has so far been great...
Ergh. Forgot the second half of my comment:
I'm also hoping to use MT in one of my fall courses, but specifically as a group-authored blog, to take the place of those awful "discussion spaces" in Web Crossings and the like. I'd love to hear whether you (or you, or you) have had any experiences with the course blog...
That's awesome liz. I wo uldn't be surprised if RIT implemented something more tuned up in the future.
market it to them, I'm sure it'll be a hit :)
For the short time I was in the XML seminar last winter, using the MT system for class materials instead of FirstClass worked out really well (plus it provides that openness with the rest of the world that you wanted). I know you've been implementing blogs in other classes recently as well, I think it's a great idea.
I used MT for my very large (~200 people) course last semester, and have been using collective blogs for the last couple of years to support discussion. I think that for the large classes it is probably unworkable, but for the small classes I deliberately went to the topic/comment structure because the threaded discussion board that was made available by the courseware (developed in-house at U Washington) meant that large chunks of the discussion went unread. I found that the lack of threads encouraged discussion.
KF, I looked at Moodle, and almost used it. The problem is that I just couldn't bear the thought of installing yet another package, and learning yet another interface. I have a lot vested in MT at this point--I've played with it extensively, and learned its various strengths and weaknesses--so for me it made more sense to bend the tool to fit the job at hand, rather than acquiring another tool.
If I didn't already have so much vested in the current systems I use, I might well have gone for Moodle or something similar. As it is, I'm on overload at the moment.
(There's an interesting post of its own buried in that, I think, about when it makes more sense to use or modify an existing not-quite-perfect tool rather than acquiring a new just-right tool...)
I see your point, Liz -- it's always difficult to make that transition to a new tool, especially when it may be perfect for one kind of project, but not for the others that the old tool has been handling so well. I'd really love to see, in an ideal world, the integration of MT and a Moodle-like plugin (or set of plugins), such that one database-driven site could support both the public aspects of the class and the parts of the class that for whatever reason (copyright issues, student privacy, etc.) need to be password-protected...
It may be as simple as providing a set of templates, which I'll definitely do once I figure out how I want things set up.
Longer term, it might also be an interesting project for one of my grad students. Not so much a plug-in as a menu-driven system to start and configure the courseware, even to copy specific items from a previous course blog (syllabus, etc) with new dates. Assuming that mySQL was used as the backend for the blog, this would be quite do-able using PHP.
There are plenty of open source course management solutions out there. Here's a very good overview: http://www.xplana.com/whitepapers/archives/Open_Source_Courseware
I'm always a staunch advocate of not driving nails with a saw (http://www.tenreasonswhy.com/weblog/archives/2003/05/15/driving_nails_with_a_saw.html), but to each his own. Some people like to roll their own solutions, but my experience in academia has almost always indicated that, unless there's significant institutional backing behind them, such efforts rarely scale and can quickly become enormous resource pits. And only a few institutions (e.g. MIT, Stanford, IUPUI, Indiana, Carnegie-Mellon, etc.) seem to have the backing and $$$ to scale those efforts.
Of course, many people may not need to scale their efforts, so rolling your own solution from MT or something else might be a good approach on the smaller scale of individual faculty or departments that can't get institutional backing for a commercial or open source solution.
Greg, as I noted, RIT does have a large-scale, institutionally-supported courseware solution based on Prometheus. They're heavily vested in that software, and its unlikely they'll shift gears to an open source solution in the forseeable future.
So my solution is intended just for my own purposes, and perhaps for use by a few other faculty teaching similar courses. In that context, rolling my own using tools that don't require me to acquire a new set of skills makes a lot of sense to me...
I have used a Java-based Wiki/Blog open source software called SnipSnap (http://www.snipsnap.org) in my course.
I am quite happy with it.
It is entirely self-contained, takes 5 minutes to set up (if you have Java runtime installed), and works in most plaftforms.
One of the advantages of combining Wiki with Blogs is that it allows collective editing right out of the box. Of course, it can become quite a mess, but SnipSnap allows you to control editable/non-editable pages.
With some careful thinking, it is possible to create quite a rich environmnent.
For those more inclined to program, it is extensible via Java Macros.
I'm two days away from finishing a summer course at Queens College, in which I used a combination of Moveable Type, HTML pages, and pages created semi-dynamically from a MySQL database. I used some PHP scripts and another database for grades, and I'd be happy to share the source, if you or anyone else is interested.
Anyhow, take a look, if you're so inclined:
http://www.lycidas.net/251_summer03/lectures/index.html -- this page contains the weblog I used to post lecture notes, and to communicate with the students.
http://www.lycidas.net/251_summer03/weblogs/ -- this page links to the student weblogs -- I incorporated a PHP script that showed which weblogs had been recently updated, which helped students figure out quickly which weblogs were worth looking at in terms of their own interests.
Zach
Well, whatever you do, don't start with Manila. That thing is a pile of poo.