So the 7:00 a.m. English 102 class ended on Thursday. Because I’d asked them to turn their last, horrendous 2,500-word essays in on Monday, I managed to post semester grades Thursday afternoon.
Friday was largely occupied with cleaning up the 102 website, writing a complicated addendum to the syllabus to handle the changes inflicted at the last minute when the library announced, two working days before fall classes begin, that it’s canceling in-class literacy instruction, and arranging to get still more pieces of paper printed. So by about 7:00 p.m. last night, I thought the summer courses were finally shoveled off my desk.
Not quite: just noticed I failed to delete drafts and peer reviews from the site. So now the computer grinds away, trying to delete 350 items one “page” at a time. Ugh.
Oh hell. For some reason, WordPress just deleted everything I wrote in this post. Having spent an hour writing all that stuff, I am NOT gonna write it again. Gotta get to cleaning this filthy house: last week’s dust storm again covered the floor with grit, and a week of doggy day care didn’t help things.
Back on Monday!
What courseware? Mine, Blackboard, allows for collect & delete.
I discovered I was teaching the early Brit lit course 2 days before classes started! I am still trying to recover–haven’t taught it for several years.
Hate the last minute changes.
@ Terri: I’ve had it with Blackboard. It’s just too cumbersome and too buggy. Classes haven’t even started and we’ve already had three messages about different hangups with abstruse instructions for time-consuming workarounds. Last fall, after I’d put everything online and had the whole class set up to fly in Blackboard from Day 1, the damn thing went down on THE FIRST DAY OF THE SEMESTER. It stayed down for a week or ten days. Then halfway through my online course, we were informed that if you had been dumb enough to click “update” when you got notices from Firefox and IE to update to FF4 or IE9, you could no longer access BB. Suddenly half my online students couldn’t get into the course! They all had to download and install Chrome or Safari to finish the course they’d signed up for and paid for.
Oh. And then this summer? Right at the end of most Summer II courses, Blackboard announced it was taking the system down for several days! This was just as several people who were teaching 100% online courses had FINAL PAPERS AND EXAMS coming in! When they squawked, they were told to suck it up.
It’s one thing after another with Blackboard. So, I set up external websites at WordPress.com that contain all the course materials the students need, plus a long slew of links. It is possible for them to do drafting and peer reviewing using WP’s “comments” function, if one so chooses. WordPress did not go down all summer long. It never barred access to any classmate. It never refused to upload a large file (such as a PowerPoint presentation). If I wanted to post a video to the site, I could do so with no trouble. The site was hassle-free to build, and it took a third to (at most) half the time to prepare for the next group as it takes to copy, clean up, and rewrite the screwed-up content in a Blackboard site.
@ frugalscholar: That is so inconsiderate. More reason why academics shouldn’t be administrators: any real manager worth her salt would have noticed some time ago that she needed to staff x or y course and arranged in plenty of time to cover it. Not like Brit Lit is a comp course tossed up there at the last minute to accommodate an overflow, as happens in community colleges.
The scheme, however, to create “modules” for any and all courses I teach, organize them in 5-week, 8-week, and 16-week formats, and store each set of materials to disk worked well for me this fall. When the chair came up with an extra 102 course (nacherly presented once a week instead of three days a week like the other one!), it took all of half an afternoon to put it together.
I’ve decided to present these WordPress sites as my private sites separate from and not directly associated with the school, saying that what they offer is digital versions of the hard-copy course packet that students (as well as anyone else) may download as desired, a log of what’s going on in the courses, and external links the students (and rhet-comp instructors anywhere) will find useful. Students will be told about their class’s site and asked to access the pages linked on it, but I may not require them to do peer-reviewing and commenting on it. This will circumvent any nascent desire on the institution’s part to force faculty to use Blackboard.
And…I’m also thinking about creating another blog that would depend off that site, whose topic would be adjunct teaching adventures and best practices. Readers could use the WP sites to observe how whatever strategy I’m experimenting with works at any given time.
Matter of fact, the more I contemplate that idea, the better I like it. I could, in theory, create salable packages for comp instructors, and I might be able to publish similar packages for faculty teaching all kinds of other undergraduate courses, publishing them through my site and taking a small commission on sales. It would be an easy way for instructors to share best practices and maybe even to publish their favorite courses for others to use.
Hi,
Is it possible to advertise on this site at all?
Thanks
Mike
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