Courseware

Courseware is used to manage the digital communication for a course, providing course participants with a means of sharing files and ommunicating with each other both inside and outside the classroom.

Blackboard
UT automatically generates a Blackboard [UT EID required] site for every course. Blackboard provides a integrated suite of course communication tools, including discussion boards, email listservs, announcements, chat, file transfers and sharing, and secure grade reporting. Blackboard can be a helpful tool because it offers so many features, and, because it can only be accessed by students and instructors for the course, you can securely transmit course documents and grades with the dropbox and grade modules. In addition, most students have had some sort of experience using Blackboard, so there is not much of a learning curve to prevent their use of the system.

Typically, Blackboard might be used to create a course forum, where students are required to regularly post comments to prompts or to each other’s posts. The instructor can post his or her syllabus and other course documents online for students to download, and the file transfer modules can be used by students to submit assignments electronically, thereby reducing paper use and organizing course documents. Also, the course collaboration tools can be used by small groups to chat or collaborate on assignments outside of the classroom.

Facebook
With the introduction of the Facebook Platform, the social networking site Facebook [account required] can also be used as courseware. While there are benefits to using Facebook as an alternative to Blackboard—most students already use Facebook (often quite a lot) so it is easy to communicate with them there—there are also significant drawbacks to be considered. First, since using Facebook as courseware requires using Facebook Apps, there is a barrier to entry: instructors have to assemble the apps that they need and have all of their students add those apps to their profile. Depending on the level of functionality that the instructor wants, this may be a complicated process. Besides being less simple to use than Blackboard, Facebook is also potentially less secure. Unlike Blackboard, at this time there is no way to securely transmit student work or grades over the site. Finally, the social networking structure of Facebook can muddy an instructor’s relationship with the class, encouraging students to interact with her or him in ways that can be unprofessional. Even if instructors are comfortable with turning over some of their authority to students, they should be sure to establish firm guidelines for interaction with students on the site.

That said, Facebook does offer a compelling suite of communication tools that can be used to create course pages and facilitate discussion boards, individual and course blogs, and document sharing and collaboration tools. Additionally, users are adding new apps to the site every day, making it a much more versatile tool than Blackboard.

Helpful lists of Facebook Apps that can be used for education can be found at Campus Grotto. Some other lists of helpful apps can be found and at Read/Write Web here, here, here, and here. Again, if an instructor decides to use Facebook for course communication, he or she should be sure to not share any secure information and specify clear boundaries for communication with students. Here you can find detailed instructions for setting up Facebook as courseware.

Forums and blogs

Description and use
Forums allow instructors or students to generate a prompt—such as a question to answer or a comment or statement to respond to—where responses are linked to that prompt in a hierarchical list. This particular structure tends to make forums a top-down communication tool because the topics of discussion are dictated by a small number of users and the choice of topic is not necessarily open to group discussion.

Blogs are typically used differently than forums. A blog is typically constructed to allow all users to post entries both at the top level of the hierarchy and as comments to other posts. As Jim points out in his post above, this tends to make the conversations on blogs more horizontal, following the flow of the group conversation as each member suggests their own topics and engages with topics suggested by others, instead of dictated by an individual in the group.

The decision to use a forum or a blog will not necessarily determine the flow of a class conversation. For instance, if all users of a forum are allowed to post topics, then it will function much more horizontally. Similarly, if blog users are restricted to only commenting on posts made by a teacher, then that blog’s conversation will be much more top-down.

In light of this fact, an instructor should base his or her decision about whether to use a forum or blog on the requirements of the assignment. If the goal of an assignment is to get students to engage in discussion with a weekly theme that will be discussed in class, a forum architecture would encourage specific posts on that particular theme. However, if an instructor wanted his or her students to explore a reading or writing assignment in order to find topics of debate or for personal interest, the freedom of a blog might be better suited to this task.

Tools for creating forums and blogs
Blackboard [UT EID required] automatically generates course forums, but it is currently not possible to modify those forums to allow your students permission to create forum topics.

If you wish to create a course blog, there are several free tools that you can use for this task. One popular tool is Google’s Blogger service. Instructors can create a blog and customize its settings for their own purposes. Blogs can be open to the public or restricted to just the members of a class. Additionally, those members can be given permission to post their own blog topics (by inviting them through the service) or they can be restricted to posting comments to blog posts by the instructor (by directing them to the course blog). In either case, students and instructors have to create free accounts with the service in order to use it.

I've been playing with Mojiti, and I thought I'd post this. It's not necessarily something that takes full advantage of what Mojiti has to offer, but it does begin to show you the possibilities:

I'm going to use Tumblr in my class this year--it's the easiest imaginable blogging tool--it's not made for long text posts, but it takes about 5 seconds to get an account, and it's very easy to post video & graphics.

My idea is to have a collaborative tumblr--where we post stuff about Devil's Highway--and also have the students create their own tumblr about an issue of their choice. I'll have a lists of kinds of sources they can use, and one of the requirements of the blog will be that they have to use different kinds (for instance, they can link to a library book or article in the UT catalog or newspaper article or blog and explain what's in it--or post a youtube video, a graph, a photograph--or narrate a personal experience about the topic or a response to a reading.

If you haven't seen this, I urge you to take five minutes, make a tumblr, and try to post the different media. It's crazy easy--and it's so stripped-down, even the technology-fearful will have an easy time.