Courseware (Course Systems, Blogs, Wikis, and Other Platforms for Online Course Support)

Welcome to the English Department Knowledge Base at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
The EDKB Wiki is a database that makes available the various interests, talents, and resources of the English Department community. See the Main Page to learn more about the EDKB. The wiki does not offer information on current course offerings, nor is it a comprehensive archive of materials related to all past courses. Visit the English Department home page for this type of information.

Unlike many other universities, UCSB currently provides no campus-wide courseware system, custom-made or commercial. (An example of a commercial system licensed by other universities is Blackboard.) This is due to budgetary constraints and the tradition of decentralized information technology development at UCSB. UCSB instructors thus commonly create course sites and other online resources through some combination of the following courseware, available through departmental, campus, free-online, or low-cost-online sources). Or they roll their own via Web-authoring.

(Note: Except for the Coursebuilder system, which is custom-created by the UCSB English Department, previously deployed courseware that had to be run from the English Department's own server computers--such as local instances of WordPress or MediaWiki--are no longer available because they cannot be scaled up in a way that is supportable by the Department technical staff, which must keep up with upgrades and security for each new site. Substitutes maintained elsewhere are thus recommended below--e.g., blog sites available from Wordpress.org itself or, as a replacement for MediaWiki,PBwiki.)

Course Management Systems (integrated platforms specifically for curricula)

Course management systems are online resources designed to support multiple, interrelated course activities--e.g., publishing syllabi and materials, enabling discussion, collecting assignments, facilitating class communications (e.g., postings and emails), etc. Course management systems range from custom software provided by a department or program (e.g. the English Department's Coursebuilder), to open-source systems installable on a server or webhost space (e.g. Moodle), to institutional, centrally-provided solutions (e.g. Sakai). [For live demos and free downloads of open-source course management systems beyond those commonly provided at UCSB, see opensourcecms.com (Examples include: ATutor, DrupalEd, SiteAtSchool, etc.).]

Moodle

Moodle

Moodle is commonly used at UCSB on an "experimental" basis (i.e., not fully supported with technical help, not fully scalable to large numbers of courses or students). Instructors can put syllabi and materials online; students can upload files; postings in discussion forums can optionally be emailed to class members; and there are basic calendar/event functions. Course sites created in Moodle are optionally private to the class or public. Moodle's interface and capabilities are now somewhat antiquated, but it is basic and serviceable. Requests to set up a Moodle site for a course may be sent by an instructor to Instructional Development at UCSB (moodle@id.ucsb.edu).

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Coursebuilder

Coursebuilder editing interface

[Restricted to instructors in UCSB English Department] Programmed by Eric Weitzel (a former graduate student in the UCSB English Dept.), Coursebuilder is a custom system that allows UCSB English Department instructors to create course Web sites through the use of Web forms. Course sites include pages for overviews, schedules of reading, assignments, student projects, etc., as well as class notes pages (for outlines, texts, or multimedia to be used during class meetings). Course content is kept in a SQL Server database that dynamically generates Web pages. Instructors may choose one of a number of frontend "skins" for the display of their course site depending on the nature of the course. There is a generic skin for UCSB English Department courses. Skins also exist for courses given by the Transcriptions Center, Early Modern Center, and American Cultures & Global Contexts Center. (Example of course created with Coursebuilder). Coursebuilder is aware of which courses an instructor is scheduled to teach and will automatically plug in information about the course, office hours, etc., based on the main department database. In addition, new courses can be started by cloning previous courses given by an instructor. (To use Coursebuilder, instructors in the UCSB English Dept. can ask the system for a password to be emailed to them.)

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Sakai

Sakai

[Under development (UCSB will decide whether to deploy in Sept. 2008)] Developed by a consortium led by universities, Sakai is intended to be an open-source alternative to commercial, full-featured, campus-wide courseware systems. The interface and usability of Sakai at UCSB is still "under construction," but the tools are quite usable. A quick summary of pros and cons (based on Alan Liu's beta-testing of the UCSB experimental version of SAKAI for a course in Fall 2006): Advantages: Without forcing universities to license expensive commercial systems and store intellectual property on outsourced servers, Sakai provides an open architecture medley of features--including discussion forums, chat, announcements, a wiki, drop box, gradebook, schedule, and many more--that can be turned or or off at the instructor's discretion. As son as an instructor signs up for a course site, it is populated by the students who have registered for the course with GOLD. Any student who add the course later in the quarter are also automatically added (Some features, such as the gradebook, may in the future also be connected automatically to other university information systems, such as the Registrar's.) By comparison, Moodle is a one-size-fits-all platform with a narrower range of capabilities. Disadvantages (current): While "free" to universities, Sakai requires significant development and support costs to roll out on a campus-wide basis. Currently, there is only funding for experimental deployment (a situation that may change depending on a future student vote on an information technology fee). The system can have a tendency to overwhelm instructors and students with a fractured mosaic of disparate features and a persistent sense that "there must be a unified dashboard somewhere that let's me see it all and configure it all." The best way for an instructor to use the tools is to restrict them to the minimum number possible so as not to overwhelm student users. UCSB has set September 2008 as the target date for a decision on committing campus-wide to either Sakai or Moodle.

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Blog Engines (or Content Management Systems)

Many instructors in the UCSB English Department have begun using blog platforms--especially WordPress--to create course sites. While originally designed as "blog engines," this class of software has in many cases evolved quickly into general-purpose "content management systems." They are not specifically designed for educational purposes, but they can be quickly configured for courses complete with many bells and whistles.

WordPress

Maggie Sloan's WordPress course site

One of the most evolved and broadly adopted blog platforms, WordPress has been in use since 2000 for a variety of UCSB English Department course sites, research sites, and faculty or graduate-student professional sites. (For an example of a course site, see Maggie Sloan's English 10LC. Examples of English Dept. research sites include: Transliteracies Project, Race and Pedagogy Project, and The Agrippa Files. Examples of faculty sites include: Rita Raley, Alan Liu.) After setting up a free account at WordPress.com, instructors (or anyone) can create one or more WordPress sites. Most WordPress (and other blog platform) sites are laid out in the form of a main content section (within which chronologically ordered "posts" appear) flanked by a sidebar with navigation links and links to related sites. However, there are a very large number of "themes" (combinations of layouts and functional features) that can be selected. WordPress sites can be configured as viewable either by the public or by a private group of users. Sites are organized by creating "categories" and then assigning posts to one or multiple categories (e.g., Schedule, Assignments, Discussion, Student Projects, etc.). The instructor can create users or allow students to register themselves as users (instructors can reassign users to higher or lower permissions levels). Posts appear in reverse chronological order (newest at top of a category), but the order can be revised by editing the posting date.

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Wikis

Wikis are collaborative authoring and editing environments in which any user allowed into the community can edit any page created by anyone else. While global Wiki communities (most famously, Wikipedia) have had problems with vandalism, edit wars, etc., smaller "trust" communities such as courses in which all the participants are known to each other on a face-to-face basis tend to be immune or self-correcting in regard to such problems. Wikis are the platform of choice of courses of classroom assignments premised on full-throated interactivity that exceeds the narrower constraints of other platforms (e.g., where interactivity is confined to a "discussion" forum). For instance, courses in which students build projects collaboratively, write glossary definitions, edit each other's work, etc., are suitable uses for a wiki. (Previously, the UCSB English Department installed local instances of the MediaWiki program--which also drives Wikipedia--on its servers to support courses. However, as the number of courses using wikis goes up, locally-installed wikis are no longer supportable. Pending any campus-wide wiki support, the strategy for the future is to use free or low-cost wikis provided by third parties.)

PBWiki

Pbwiki site for Alan Liu's English 149 course

While there are many free or low-cost wikis, Pbwiki (the first two letters stand for "peanut butter") stands out for its features, configurability, and widespread adoption by educators (ranging from K-12 to college). Instructors get a free account that allows them to set up multiple wikis sharing a single storage quota (100 Mb at the time of this writing, which is sufficient for normal course purposes if students keep large multimedia files elsewhere and merely link to them from the wiki). The free-account level implies a minimal number of ads on the wiki (so minimal, indeed, that Alan Liu has not so far noticed any while setting up the wiki for a Winter 2008 course). Free PBWiki features include:

• Choice from a small set of interface "themes" or "skins."
• Unlimited pages and revisions.
• Wiki can be made public or private to a group of users.
• Choice of easy-to-use graphical-style editing interface or source-code editing. (Most students will need little, if any, guidance in creating, editing, or formatting content.)
• Users can upload images and other content.
• The instructor can download a backup of the site content as a .pdf file.

There are various levels of one-time-fee or subscription-fee services that can be optionally purchased. For example, the next step up includes more storage space, a few more themes, no ads, and more granular control over user access level (e.g., administrators, contributors, readers) [Caution: instructors may feel the need to upgrade just for the last mentioned feature: the ability to assign students to a "contributor" status without the full permissions of administrator.]

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Online Collaborative (Office) Suites

While not as full-featured as office suites installed on a local computer, the new generation of online office suites run over the Web from servers. They allow users to work on their documents collaboratively with others based on a single, central document (rather than multiple copies of documents that are emailed around with all the fallout from ensuing entropy).

Google Docs & Spreadsheets

Word-processing editing interface in Google Documents & Spreadsheets

Previously called Writely before it was bought and extended by the Google company, Google Docs & Spreadsheets is one of the most advanced and widely used instances of the new breed of productivity software (word processors, spreadsheet programs, presentation programs) based on the "Web services" paradigm, according to which the software needed to get work done lives not on one's personal computer but on a central server kept by someone else. The advantages include: multiple people can share and edit documents simultaneously (needing only to be named as collaborators on the same document residing on the server), all one's documents are available from anywhere, and upgrades to the productivity software are managed automatically by the software creators. The disadvantages are: one requires Internet access to work, and the bells and whistles available through a Web-based editing interface (in which one works in a browser) are fewer than in a productivity suite like Microsoft's Office.

      Google Docs & Spreadsheets includes a word processor, spreadsheet program, and Powerpoint-like presentation program, all of which can be used if one has a free Google account (which is also the account for Gmail and other Google services). One can start a document from scratch or by importing existing files from .doc, .ppt, and other popular formats. Editing is by means of a Web editing interface enhanced with some GUI-like (graphical user interface) features--so that one can format text by pressing on buttons for bold, italics, underline, text color, font, etc., or insert links and images with similar buttons. (However, power users will appreciate the fact that the interface can be switched at any time to source-code view, which allows direct use of most HTML and CSS code.) Documents are optionally public or private. Editing can be "shared" with collaborators by supplying their email addresses (each collaborator will automatically receive a message from Google inviting them to log in to the document). Multiple collaborators can edit different parts of the document simultaneously. (The only conflicts arise when two or more people simultaneously edit the same sentence, at which point the system makes a decision to save one revision. However, the system notifies the loser in the race about the conflict and allows unsaved work to be rescued.) Each collaborator's revisions are separately tracked by the system, which includes a version-tracking and -reversion feature so that different time-states of the document can be compared to each other. (In the revision view, the changes made by each collaborator is displayed in a different color.) When a document is finished, it can be exported in .doc, .ppt, and other well-known formats.       Google Docs & Spreadsheets has been most commonly used in the UCSB English Department for collaborative word processing. In courses, for example, students can be asked to co-edit a document. Similarly, the system is perfect for faculty collaborators on departmental administrative documents of various sorts--e.g., grant proposals, memos, etc. (Collaborators on such documents often use colors or highlighting to make comments to each other during the editing process.)

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--Contributors to this page: Alan Liu, Jeremy Douglass. Page started: 01:55, 11 December 2007 (PDT)