{"id":71,"date":"2008-01-23T02:21:40","date_gmt":"2008-01-23T02:21:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/?p=71"},"modified":"2025-08-18T13:23:55","modified_gmt":"2025-08-18T20:23:55","slug":"cms-as-portal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/2008\/01\/cms-as-portal\/","title":{"rendered":"CMS as Portal?"},"content":{"rendered":"

OK, I promise, this won’t really<\/i> be a Blackboard rant. But at our college, the most supported system is Bb. We’re piloting one or two others (Moodle!), but the support folks are accustomed to Bb. Each semester everyone’s classes, both onsite and online, are automatically assigned a Bb course, whether or not they’re used.<\/p>\n

Students taking online classes have become used to Blackboard. They don’t realize it’s just a shell, a system inside the internet. Last semester, I “erased” all the buttons on my Bb classes and left only one, with only one page attached: the page redirecting them to the Moodle class, which opened in a new browser window. Nevertheless, many students continued to use Bb as a portal, only entering my Moodle class through Bb’s interface.\n<\/p>\n

I thus encouraged our Moodle users to do as I did: make all but one of Bb’s buttons unavailable, but keep the class there with a redirecting link. A pair of respected colleagues, David and Don Megill<\/a>, resisted this idea of continuing with Bb as a kind of portal. But we all acknowledged that students use it that way. Gradually it began to annoy me.\n<\/p>\n

So last week (today is the first day of spring semester), I simply didn’t make my Bb classes available at all. It is printed in the Schedule of Classes (and its online version) that students must email me before the first day of class. I have directions to the classes on web pages, linked from both my home page<\/a> and the Cybercosta page<\/a>. These pages give the URL for the Moodle classes. Then I watched enrollment.\n<\/p>\n

This morning, the first day, 96 of 160 students had gotten in on their own. I sent the others an email (using the email they used to register at MiraCosta) with the URL. As I write this (the evening of the first day), all but about 6 students per class have found their way. Without Blackboard. Perhaps they will learn that not all learning experiences are based in that monopolistic system. It’s a good day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

OK, I promise, this won’t really be a Blackboard rant. But at our college, the most supported system is Bb. We’re piloting one or two others (Moodle!), but the support folks are accustomed to Bb. Each semester everyone’s classes, both onsite and online, are automatically assigned a Bb course, whether or not they’re used. Students […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-71","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cmslms"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=71"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10087,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71\/revisions\/10087"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}