Slashdot Mirror
New Technologies for Colleges?
sinco asks: "I'm on my university's Student Government Association as the position of Vice President of Technology. Our school has currently provided wireless internet, course management software (Blackboard), personal web space for students, the ability to register classes online, and some more tech features. What type of solutions is out there that might enhance the university's technology for students? What type of cool things is your school doing tech wise for its students?"
The entire website is in-house and done with PHP4.
The Original was coded by a recent Graduate, with new improvements being added as time permits.
With plain old webpages, students can troll the internet to find class information professors are covering. This is especially important if one wants to "preview" a class. Well, with blackboard. Unless your registered in the class, you have no access to it.
That depends on how the system has been configured, if you click the Modules tab and search by course code you will be able to get "guest" read-only access to the module, providing that it hasn't been turned off at system level or overridden at course level by the Instructor/TA
But I would agree it's not a great system, if you think it's bad as a user it's a real PITA to administer
- Access to all my modules
;) Although missing practicals isn't such a good idea (as I've found out lately...)
- Download electronic format of lecture notes
- Online examinations and tests (Using perception software)
- Outlook web acces (yuk)
- Online timetbale & calendar
- Online enrollment
- Voyager library system:
- Search the library for books/videos/cd/other media online
- Check which books you have out
- Renew existing loans
- Various other little things...
The entire campus now uses electronic swipe cards for everything from self-service library to access to the computer labs, the gym, etc... so it makes providing electronic resources that much easier.
Coupled with wifi access across the entire campus, I'm pretty impressed with the e-services they provide.
The killer for me is probably the electronic lecture notes. It saves going to lectures
I'm a geography student btw.
(Thought I'd follow up the 'death-to-Blackboard' rants with a constructive suggestion...)
If you want to ditch Blackboard, take a look at Moodle. It's a dang good PHP-based courseware system that's open source, free (in both senses), very actively developed, and (important for administration types) you can buy support and various other services via Moodle.com. You could set it up in your personal webspace as a sandbox for people to look at and play with.
Plus, you could have CS students write modules or otherwise contribute to development - everybody wins!
You can take a look at how other schools are using Moodle at their site list.
Enjoy!
Blackboard got into the game early with the online course stuff, so I guess it's a standard, but I don't know why people aren't dropping it for moodle. http://moodle.org/
It's got more functionality, open source, and less than a 20 meg setup using mysql and php. You can do content, testing, flash, and it's all easy, with template options, and flexible as far as you want to customize to your ability with CSS graphics etc.
blackboard is in the neighborhood of 100,000 dollars right? I'm pretty sure they do a yearly maintenance, or support fee right, and you can't mess with their system too.
ouch. Schools can use that money elsewhere. Get moodle, and invest in flash, and a dozen canon xl2 cameras and some vegas video workstations.
Make available as many discounted art supplies and free ebooks as possible.
...::----::...
I am in no way affiliated with this sig.