Tag Archives: course management systems

October 11, 2007, 5:11 am

Questions for the audience about course management systems

I’m pretty busy right now with writing, administering, and grading midterms — so blogging is light for a day or so more. However, given the recent posts and traffic about course management systems, I wonder if you wouldn’t mind answer a few questions down in the comments area.

Teachers: What do you need a course management system to do? What functionality do you consider essential?
Teachers: What are the best ways for a course management system to help make your job of managing a course easy?
Students: Same questions as #1 and #2.
Current CMS software users: What are the three features of your CMS that are the most essential? If you could change three things about the way your CMS works, what would they be and what would you rather have?

October 9, 2007, 2:41 pm

Two possible replacements for course management systems

By Robert Talbert

This afternoon I finally reached the limit of my patience with Angel. The details are unimportant (but revolve around the patently stupid refusal of Angel to automate tasks for multiple sections of the same course). Just suffice to say that I spent a good portion of the last half hour seriously investigating ways to declare independence from Angel and all other proprietary CMS’s.

I came up with two possible options.

Option 1 is to use Wikispaces to make a course wiki, containing pages for different content. Wikispaces allows the posting of files, too, with a pretty generous 2 GB storage limit and no limit on bandwidth. So it would be easy to use the wiki as a glorified file server, which is pretty much all I need from a course web site. Use a basic email client as I discussed at length here to handle communications. Each page has a discussion section attached to it to allow for…

October 4, 2007, 8:04 am

How to make email complicated, Angel style

By Robert Talbert

Here’s a little mini-tour through one of the many reasons why Angel, and other course management systems, drive me crazy and basically beg for me not to use them. This has to do with a simple and common course management task: Sending an email to all students in a class.

First of all, if you were using a basic email client to do this task, sending an email would be a matter of creating a distribution list for the students in the class — a one-time startup task — and then the following:

Type the name of the list in the To: blank. (Most email clients have an auto-complete feature that doesn’t even require you complete the full name of the recipient.)
Type in the subject and text of the email.
Hit “Send”.

Three steps, each of which is easy and intuitive.

If you want to do this in Angel, on the other hand, it becomes a seven-step task, which is really nine tasks — each of which,…