Using Blogs Instead of Course Management Systems

In my academic life, I have always marched to my own drum beat, and I get knocked down quite a bit for that. Add to this the researcher in me who constantly worries that I might not be correct after all. I tell you, contrary to appearances, there is a lot going on in my head. All the time :-)

My own drum beat in online teaching is perhaps best seen in how I have continued to refine my usage of blogger.com and reliance on emails for class interactions. Ideally I would have liked my students to also be ready and willing to discuss their understanding in an open environment--a transparent classroom. But, at least one student formally requested that our class interactions be private, as much as a "regular" class is behind closed doors. Fair enough, I thought, even though my preference is for openness.

I am, therefore, immensely pleased with this piece in the Chronicle. Way too pleased because it is about a day-long meeting to improve CUNY's online classes, in which a key idea was whether the free blogging software can take the place of course management software:

The meeting's focus was an idea that is catching on at a handful of colleges and universities around the country: Instead of using a course-management system to distribute materials and run class discussions, why not use free blogging software — the same kind that popular gadflies use for entertainment sites?

The approach can save colleges money, for one thing. And true believers like Mr. Groom argue that by using blogs, professors can open their students' work to the public, not just to those in the class who have a login and password to a campus course-management system. Open-source blog software, supporters say, also gives professors more ability to customize their online classrooms than most commercial course-management software does.

So, I am not alone.
You know what a relief that is? More than anything, it is impossible for every faculty to teach the same way--we differ in our teaching styles as much as, or even more than, how we differ in our learning styles. However, it feels good to know that there are at least a few others who are experimenting with, and finding success, in the same kind of things that I am trying. (Here is my blog for the online class that is coming to an end this spring term.)

The Chronicle piece also has an example:

To demonstrate how a blog might be used in a course, Zoë Sheehan-Saldaña, an assistant professor of art at CUNY's Baruch College, showed off the blog for her course "Designing With Computer Animation." Students posted their assignments on the blog so that other students — and people outside the class — could see them. Students were encouraged to post comments on one another's work as well.

Although new versions of Blackboard include a bloglike feature, Ms. Sheehan-Saldaña said there are benefits in teaching students to create blogs using systems they might encounter in future jobs.

Maybe soon I will be able to convince everybody registered in one of my classes about the sheer joy of working in this transparent classroom. But, as long as even one student has reservations about it, well, I need to treat online classes on par with regular classes and cannot impose openness. Once before, I tried partial openness--by including blogging as a requirement, as an assignment. But, that is not the same as a truly open classroom.

Now, I have even less of an incentive to experiment with Moodle :-)

The liberating Web :-)

So, to give you an example of why I prefer the flexible approaches of the various free tools available over the rather suffocating LMS like WebCT or Moodle ....

I teach an online class this term (GEOG 418).  The syllabus, schedule of tasks, etc, which are the basic contract items with students, are at pages that I maintain at wou.edu.  Here is the homepage for the class.

The discussion questions and the student responses are all through emails--from our respective wou addresses, so that we don't have to be concerned about any spam/blocking issues.  I have a group distribution address for this class--so, students email to this one address (geog418) and we all get the messages.

I have started doing videos to clarify concepts.  These videos I route through YouTube.  I have set up a blog for the class, where I post my emails to the class and the YouTube videos.  Just as any post here in this blog automatically is pushed out to your email addresses, which is how you are reading it now, I have set up my class blog to be automatically mailed to the same geog418 address.  So, it is not that students have to check my blog as well--all they need to do is check their emails :-)

On top of all this, I have also set up the class homepage  such that the latest two blog posts are automatically fed into that page.  So, when you go to this class homepage, you will find the latest two blog posts also there.

The neat thing is that once I have set these up, there is no additional work for me because all these from different service providers work well and automatically with each other.

Thus, I am not sure whether I should invest time and effort to migrate to Moodle.  If there are some serious advantages, please let me know and I shall certainly look into it.

ps: I don't have students also blogging because then I need to provide support for some kind of a "blogging 101", whereas no new learning is needed to read and send emails ....