Off the Grid!

Wow! I can’t believe it: I’m now free of Blackboard!

Everything the comp students could possibly need online henceforth resides, as of this moment, at WordPress.com. I’ve transferred all the course materials, all the links, and all the weekly announcements, and I’ve invented a way for students to post drafts and peer reviews at the site.

For communication, I’ve set up g-mail accounts for each course, so that instead of getting lost in the flood of junkmail the college district dumps in my in-box, students’ messages will arrive in their own neatly filtered in-boxes. All the student e-mails from 102 will come to one place; all from 101 to another place; all from 235 to a third place. It’ll be easy to spot who the senders are and what they need. In theory, we probably could use Google’s instant messaging or chat for real-time conversation, but I’d just as soon not have them in my face outside of class hours.

And in Google Docs I’ve set up spreadsheets to track grades for all three classes, neatly clustered in a single workbook. These were incredibly easy to organize—much, much simpler than the time-consuming, ditzy process of setting up Blackboard’s grade book.

LOL! What’s happened here is that I’ve created my own course management system using Blackboard and Google. It’s not all-in-one, but it’s so much faster, easier, and reliable that whatever the drawbacks to having the grades & messaging in Google, they’ll be worth it.

I’ve categorized the weekly “learning module” announcements by term lengths: five-week courses, seven-week courses, sixteen-week courses. Once I have them all written, these can reside on the server as unpublished posts until they’re needed. Then when I’m assigned, say, a five-week course, I can filter posts by the “5-week modules” category, access them easily, and simply reset the scheduled publication date. At the end of each course, I unpublish everything; tweak whatever needs to be tweaked (these are set up to be as timeless as possible), and then schedule them all to go back up at the desired intervals.

Same with the “Assignments” categories: the copy in the “draft” posts (where students will post their drafts and peer reviews as comments) is as plain-vanilla as possible, so these can be recycled with little revision.

Freestanding items such as the syllabus, course calendar, instructor’s e-mail, and the like are posted in pages, which in the Twenty Ten theme appear in the banner’s bottom margin:

I’ve deep-sixed the “Blogroll” and replaced it with “Resources,” a list of links to various sites and tools that may help the students.

This is all the same stuff that resided in Blackboard, except it’s all on one page, and its organization is intuitive to young people who are accustomed to navigating the Web. One thing you can say about Blackboard (of the many things you could say about it…) is that it’s about as unintuitive as unintuitive gets.

And one thing you can say about WordPress.com, of the several things you could say, it does not go down!

Oh, and what else can we say about it?

• It does not refuse to accept a PowerPoint presentation.
• It does not turn posting a video into a trip to Hades and back.
• It does not inform you that because you were stupid enough to download the latest Firefox or IE upgrade, you can no longer access your course.
• It does not inflict changes that require whole new learning curves every couple of years.
• When the WordPress folks install an upgrade or a new tool, it does not cause the entire system to crash.
• Nor does it disable the very part of the system that you were using to drive a key part of your pedagogy.
• It does not make you jump through a half-dozen hoops to send an e-mail to a student.
• It does not present functions that stop working and are never fixed.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is better even than being off the electric grid. At least the utility companies function. Most of the time.