Online & Hybrid Course Development Faculty Seminar (2009)
Some months ago I was asked to present something about technology and learning in the classroom. I use a lot of technology myself, and try to teach a fairly tech-enabled course on campus. Initially, I thought I would make some kind of presentation involving the myriad composing tools available on the web today. Then I learned that I was agreeing to participate as a seminar/workshop leader for our Online and Hybrid Course Development Faculty Seminar, something that altered the stakes considerably.
CUNY is a Blackboard university, or has been for about a decade now. It is difficult to imagine entering an official seminar to develop online/hybrid courses and advocating tools that function outside the Blackboard CMS environment. What to do?
Intriguingly, Blackboard got something of a black eye this spring because the university’s upgrade to version 8 went so awry that many faculty who use Bb found themselves unable to conduct their courses, with people teaching asynchronous online courses most dramatically affected. Concurrently, the university launched the CUNY Academic Commons, a site for collaboration across the nearly two dozen schools and colleges in the system. The Commons is built on WordPress Multi-user, BuddyPress, and Mediawiki, a radical departure from the vender locked model of Blackboard. This development changed a lot of my thinking about what I might do.
I decided to encourage workshop participants to develop meaningful, pedagogically relevant uses for both the Blog and Wiki tools in Blackboard. My suspicion is that participants do not necessarily know these tools, much less understand them. I have uses to which I’ve put these tools in my classes. But I have really only scratched the surface. I am optimistic that writing faculty will find real value in the possibility of collaboration and re-writing through wiki work. And the uses of the blog in classes are numerous. Discussion board is certainly important, but it’s not the only solid learning tool.
Of course, the Bb encased blog and wiki tools are limited. How does one really engage Web 2.0 without being able to syndicate to the web through RSS? Hmm. But that’s a side issue, or so I’m telling myself.
Additionally, I decided to give participants a brief tour of some ways one might use blog and/or wiki tools to create a course website, using some work happening around CUNY as concrete examples and the Academic Commons as a place to practice building a hypothetical course website. This latter piece is likely to come off as disconnected for some, particularly since faculty are being encouraged to build their courses in Blackboard. For others, my hope is that the effort will encourage an engagement with and responsibility for the technologies they opt to use in their courses.
I don’t think the Academic Commons is the place to really host a course website, but it’s a place to try out some things. And it won’t hurt for faculty to see and experience some parts of the commons. Perhaps they’ll get engaged with colleagues across CUNY.
We’ll see.
