Just got back from the 44th International Medieval Conference. Heard some interesting presentations, bought some books, and had some time to do some thinking about my World History classes—online as well as face-to-face. Did some thinking about technology as well. What I’m working on right now, is integrating non-Blackboard (i.e.open-access) materials into my course while not burdening the student with even more stuff to do and places to go. Judicious use of links and buttons means that my open-access stuff will appear in the main Bb window (for students who choose to use it). Students who don’t want to use Bb (such as visiting students during Spring/Summer sessions) can simply head to my personal webspace and access everything they need (apart from the Bb gradebook).
For this project, I’m using WordPress along with the Courseware plug-in from ScholarPress. This plug-in makes it easy to assemble assignments and reading from a central repository of bibliographic links. It even imports from Zotero, which is just excellent.
So why am I doing this? I don’t like BlackBoard. I know that we have it and, with the upcoming move to version 9, we’ll have it for a while. I like version 9. It’s a good version of BlackBoard, but that’s about it. There’s so many cool web tools out there that Bb is increasingly looking dated and clunky. I don’t have a philosophical problem with Bb—although some of its patent lawsuits are troubling in their implications—and I don’t really have a problem with my stuff being behind a passworded fire-wall. This is purely a technology problem for me. While I appreciate that Bb has an enormous number of useful features, many of these duplicate existing open source solutions.
I recognize the problems with abandoning a CMS—not all faculty members would be as excited as I to learn that they had to cobble together course resources from various open source tools. It would overwhelm tech support people who would have a seemingly infinite number of tools to understand. It’s a nice thought experiment, to get rid of Bb and replace it with…nothing, but I’m not sure how workable it is.
There are open source CMS out there as well—Moodle for one—but even switching from one CMS to another might be more problematic than not.
