Have to spend half the afternoon in unpaid labor at the campus. To be allowed to continue teaching online courses, we’re required to attend a three-hour workshop in Canvas, the new course management software with which the college is replacing hated Blackboard. The thing is, Canvas has online tutorials, and so it’s unclear exactly why we need to sit through three hours of unpaid training.
It’s particularly annoying because I have no intention of changing my present strategy, which is to post an announcement on the CMS’s homepage directing students to the website I constructed after I ran out of patience with Blackboard.
If they order me to stop doing that, then I will quit teaching the magazine writing course, because I am not going to rebuild that whole complicated course AGAIN, for free. At $2,400 a semester, it’s just not worth my time. The truth is, if I feel I just must teach one or two courses a semester, I can go over to the Great Desert University and pick up a course for $3,000, a far cry from what the junior colleges are paying.
Anyway. Before that I have to go down to the church and help set up for tomorrow evening’s silent auction. Won’t be able to spend as much time as I’d like doing that, because I’ll have to leave here at quarter after noon to get to the campus and find the building and room, and will have to bolt down some lunch before leaving for that. So my coreligionists no doubt will once again regard me as a hopeless slacker and tightwad. Oh well.
Tomorrow my friend KJG and I are spending the day at a big artwalk event. That should be fun. Probably we’ll have to break off early, though, to give me time to get to the evening shindig on time. So…it looks like all day today and tomorrow will be occupied.
vite, vite…
Planting Our Pennies has posted a new balance sheet, very positive. I like the bar graph strategy they use.
Speaking of planting, 101 Centavos has a gardening report with some information I didn’t know.
Money Beagle posts part 3 of The Worst Job Ever.
Revanche reflects on strength of character.
Donna Freedman generates an incredible number of comments in her report on the pissing match between her daughter Abby and Financial Samurai.
TB sees the light at Blue Collar Workman.
Evan posts an update on his net worth: modest growth in October, pretty darned good for 2012, awesome over the long haul.
And my grutch about yesterday’s classroom pains in the tuchus, complete with salutary illustrations, went live yesterday.
Drat! Must fly! Later…
Oh gawd, I hated Blackboard. Flashbacks!
And thanks for including us =)
Canvas has an entirely different design. Though it looks like it could have some hateworthy aspects, in many respects it looks much simpler.
You can’t copy and paste your syllabus from Word into Canvas (well, you can, but you’ll have to manually reformat the damn thing). However, as the instructor was yakking I realized that like BB and WordPress, it has an HTML view. So if you know WordPress, what you could do is run your syllabus through WordPress’s Word scrubber to paste it into a WordPress post. Adjust formatting as necessary — WP is pretty good at holding the formatting, though. Then view the code in your WP post, copy out of there; then open a page in Canvas; switch to the HTML view in that, and paste. It would be pretty easy.
A little basic understanding of code would help, too.
I intend to keep my class shells in WordPress and just use Canvas to post a notice with the URL. If the school tells me I have to rewrite everything in Canvas, I probably will tell them they can find someone else to do their magazine writing course.
I think it is ridiculous that you are able to piece together a better CMS! Seems like there is a business opportunity here.
Well, of course to sell one of these programs to a large university or college district, you have to make it all things to all people. That tends to complicate matters.
I see WordPress, however, has begun to market a CMS. IMHO it’s a natural for them: the program is easy to use, intuitive for most college-age students, and with just a few plug-ins it would do just about anything most instructors would need.