Wow! This is too good to be true! With the English 101 students out the door, I thought I’d take a few hours to at least get a start on preparing my wildcat WordPress website for the fall semester. This would mean discarding the summer session’s blog comments and replies (hundreds and hundreds of them!), updating or rewriting out-of-date posts, and uploading all new course materials.
I sat down one evening earlier this week to start what I expected to be the usual long and tedious process. Within an hour or two, I was done with everything except posting the fall syllabus, calendar, and assignments and rebuilding the grade sheet.
Whoa! That defies belief.
In Blackboard, you can expect to spend hours—many hours!—on converting a previous semester’s course for the new semester. Some of these eye-glazing chores are incredibly time-consuming. I would normally figure two to four days to convert each course.
But thanks to the vastly simpler and cleaner software that is WordPress, the do-it-yourself CMS sites I built convert quickly and easily.
Unload the blog comments (in which students deposited their essay drafts and then wrote comments on each others’ drafts):
Manage Comments > Select All > Move to Trash
Remove the posted 5-week modules:
Posts > Categories > Five-week Modules > Filter
Select Post > Quickedit > “Unpublish” x 5
The modules for the 16-week course were already scheduled, so I didn’t have to fool with setting the dates for those to go live.
Reset the dates for Group Assignments:
Posts > Categories > Group Assignments > Filter
Quick edit > Date > Update x 12
Beside myself with joy! No sitting there staring at the damn system grinding away, no tooth-clenching frustration, no crashes, no error messages…Wordpress just works! It works fast and efficiently, unlike the detestable Blackboard.
Speaking of the which, this charming little message came in today from the school’s Blackboard administrator:
FYI
If you are copying a previous course into your new course shell, copy the course first and then modify it. If you delete all content buttons from the new course shell you will lose the entry point to the course and will be unable to access it. Another alternative is to modify the new course shell, but DO NOT delete the “Announcement Button”. Leave the Announcement Button as your Entry Point. Please let me know if you have any questions.
You know…I want to teach; I don’t want to do an IT tech’s work. That notice up there: that is just the first in a flurry of similarly inscrutable and frustrating warnings and announcements that will come peppering down on us over the next two or three weeks.
WordPress doesn’t try to turn writers or teachers into something they’re not. WordPress lets you teach. Or write, as most of us prefer. Just teach. Just write.
This evening I finished off the conversion for Fall 2011. Started around 5:30 or so. By 7:00 p.m. I was done. DONE! That’s COMPLETELY FINISHED! With zero, nought, NO MORE fiddling around to have to do. The course is up and ready to go for the fall students.
This is so amazing.
Even more pleasing, one of the summer students remarked in passing that she really liked having the course materials and projects online through WordPress—that it was a lot easier than trying to work in Blackboard.
I should hire myself out to faculty who’d like to break free from Blackboard. I wonder what people would pay to get out from underneath that thing?
Could I persuade you to hire me to build something like this for you?
That is nice! I remember working with Blackboard when I picked up a two-year degree in 2005-2007. It was less than user-friendly from a student perspective, and I understand it was far worse for our instructors. From what you’ve blogged here, it’s gotten even worse since then.
Marketing this approach makes a lot of sense, if the colleges with BB aren’t requiring faculty to use it. I’m not an instructor, but if I were and if I didn’t feel up to setting it up myself, I’d probably be willing to pay to have something that worked intuitively and reliably.
I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve bookmarked it so that I can explore your resource links for my two homeschooled teenagers. If you are going to make the site private once the class begins, though, I guess I should do that sooner rather than later…
I hear you. Blackboard was also the bane of my graduate school experience. I hope your students appreciate Word Press.
Wishing you a less stressful semester ahead!
Yes, you could definitely sell this service to your colleagues. It may not turn into a big-time business, but you’ll still make some extra money. And the more you do it, the faster you’ll get at it.
I would 100% let the wordpress people know (especially Matt Mullewberg) about this post. They LOVE when people take their product to the next level for something more than a blog.
@ Evan: The main thing is not to make them think it’s for a commercial purpose. I personally don’t think education — especially low-cost public education (and you can’t get much lower-cost than the Maricopa County Community colleges) — comes under that heading. But you could convince yourself that it does.
Really, it wouldn’t take much doing for WP.com to build a functioning, highly salable, minimalist course management system. All that’s needed would be an e-mail system (how hard can that be?) and a way for students to view their grades and only their grades.