I was working on the POT website. One of our wonderful facilitators, Laura Paciorek, had sent me some sample self-assessments she uses with her students. She had mentioned them at her Elluminate session “Connections in Online Classes” last Friday (the recording is here) and had been asked to share. So I went to the website to post them on the Handouts page.
It’s really a WordPress blog, so I went to upload the two pdf’s. It was very easy. Then I thought — wait a minute, this isn’t how I do things!
I put everything in a folder on the college’s server, a folder for all our Program for Online Teaching stuff. The website used to be a plain website. Then it was in Moodle. Everything was linked to the files in the web folder.
I tell everyone new to online teaching: don’t enter anything into the LMS you don’t have to! Keep it all in your own files, in your own folder, and link. Every button in Blackboard can be changed to show one of your pages. All you have to enter into an LMS are your quiz questions and discussion prompts, and even these should originate as plain text files you keep on your hard drive.
Why? because who knows whether that system, that package, will be available five years from now? or next year? What if you teach at two colleges mandating two different systems, and no one lets you export? what if you change your mind? what if your pedagogy takes a different turn? what if someone gives you freedom you didn’t have before? what if everyone went to the same restaurant on the same day and ordered blintzes? (They don’t, but I worry about these things…)
So what the heck was I doing uploading pdf files into WordPress? I must have been mad. I put them in the web folder, uploaded, and linked.
Whew, that was close…
Great point, Lisa. And I would go further and suggest that the same could be said about student generated content. I use a wiki with my class so that students have access to their projects long after Blackboard has been reset to UNAVAILABLE.
Indeed some really good points here. I’m currently facing another semester with an upgrade to a brand new system that is forcing people to migrate their content yet AGAIN and they asking (quite reasonably) why they have to. “It’s working just fine the way it was, why do I need to do all this extra work again?”
We need more innovative people like you around here who have learned from experience how to mitigate the risks of working within uni systems by using your own.
Your vigilence is commendable, and I would gather your strategy is also to keep your own copies of whatever goes on that web folder.
However, when you upload that PDF file for your WordPress blog, it does not go *into* WordPress like a vault that can never be opened w/o WordPress– it us merely uploaded to a directory on the server where you blog sits; I don’t see any difference in the end from putting files on your schools web server. And there may even be a performance hit when your blog server has to reach out to other servers to load media.
But maybe I quibble a miniscule point.
But perhaps I quibble too much
Ah, good point, Alan! And yet, in the case of our noob faculty, I wonder how many even know where that folder is, and how to access it?
In fact, I have spent the better part of two hours trying to update my 1998 knowledge in order to find faculty who don’t know HTML a free, easy to use WYSIWYG editor and ftp uploader so they can fix hideous home pages made a decade ago by some staffer in a flurry of web-fare. Most don’t know where their home and web folders are, or what they are, or how to get there. I heard one report that our staff told a faculty member they must come into the tech center and use Dreamweaver in order to update their web page. I begin to think some training should start on how the web works, and that we should keep our own folders elsewhere anyway.
I guess what I’m actually doing is keeping a whole web site together in those web folders, not just using them to store files. At any time, an hour writing some links would make it a basic site that could be used from anywhere, without any system other than a browser.
Good point also on the possible performance hit. I have not experienced this yet from any system, but I’ll watch for it. And thanks, guys, for making me think this out a little more! 🙂
I like Kompozer for a basic WYSIWYG html editor (it’s available for Windows, Mac & Linux). Lately I’ve been using Quanta plus in Linux, but it’s probably too complicated for novice users.
For ftp on Windows, I still use WS-FTP 95 LE, which is a very basic ftp no longer distributed by the publisher, but still available with only a little bit of searching.