WordPress a Better LMS

I should just “ditto” what’s said above: I’ve been using edublogs for the last few years in place of the LMS (Angel), and the comments I get are about evenly split between “should use Angel” and “like his website.” My main concern about the edublogs website, and the reason I’ve used Angel entirely for my online graduate seminar (though I’ve posted the syllabus to my edublogs site, for transparency), is that I want to have discussion forums that aren’t publicly visible. On the other hand, the way our LMS handles classes, it’s much easier to start a new semester of the survey, or a course I’ve offered before, with my stable resource site than to recreate or reload archived versions. It makes previous semester’s exemplars available, too.

The main complaint I get is about grade posting. I say in my syllabus, and in class, that I’m willing to talk about grades at any time, but some students prefer the anonymity of checking online (even though my grades are pretty easy to calculate, if you keep track of what you’ve gotten on assignments). I’m not entirely convinced that posting grades to an LMS is FERPA-compliant, though that’s the assumption most people make: it seems too much like posting grades on the door, to me.

I’ve actually heard this as well: on-line courses are complex things, and for students to learn several new professors’ organizational methods each term–however beautiful or well-organized they are–takes the first few weeks of class, or basically until they’ve done each kind of assignment at least once. I love creating my own pages, though I’m still using CSS and html rather than wordpress, but I’m torn about this, and thinking of moving more fully into our (new) desire2learn installation in the fall (we’re dumping Blackboard). It is less creative and interesting (and, well, pretty), but I figure there will be less of a learning curve, and it will be just one site for the course and the gradebook together. It does certainly feel more corporate, and I really, really don’t like that.

Have people found ways to combine their courses into campus LMS effectively?

Has anyone done a study to explain why some students prefer one system over another? I also do not use Blackboard, but students on my campus sometimes complain on evals that I don’t. I assume it’s because BB is so ubiquitous here that they just get annoyed that I’m the one class that makes them go elsewhere. But I’m wondering why you are getting evals praising you for not using BB, and I’m getting them criticizing me for not using it. Also, since I read all the evals for all adjuncts in my department, I see that some of them get the same comments: “How can she improve? Start using Blackboard.” So, it’s not just me but anyone on my campus who doesn’t use BB. I’m assuming it’s campus climate more than anything, but maybe it’s something else?

With Blackboard it is possible to set the entry page for your course to any web page. I usually appease both sorts of students in my lower level classes by setting up a wordpress site and then having the blackboard site simply show them the wordpress site within it. This allows me to use Blackboard’s gradebook and assignment submission facilities as well.

This wouldn’t work so well in a class where the students were required to comment on posts of course, but for big first and second year classes without that sort of work it is a nice work around.

At my uni students do complain about me not using Blackboard. I still use it for the SafeAssign dropbox, but that’s all. I put up a permanent announcement on the BB homepage for each course that reads “This Blackboard site exists solely as a way for students to use SafeAssign. To find information on assignments, syllabi, etc. visit http://….” That way they can just click over from BB if they are signed into BB for another course. I’m not savvy enough to do what Nicole suggests, although it sounds like a great compromise!

I’ve been using it for years and just love it, for many of the reasons above. I should say, though, that sometimes I do password protect my syllabus because it has all of my contact information at the top. My office info is not listed on my online uni profile (grad students only have a short bio and email because we change offices a lot). I don’t really want strangers knowing where my office is and when I will be there, and when that info is on WP and Google includes my site in its search results, random people can easily find out that information. I’ve had a couple run ins that make me worry about privacy more than most people might.

I think that wiping a course at the end of the semester actually negates some of the advantages of using an “open LMS” like WordPress to begin with. One of the main problems I have with the traditional LMS like Blackboard is that it atomizes learning into these artificial chunks of semesters and courses. When teaching with Blackboard, I’ve frequently had students ask me how they could get access to the course after the semester is over–because they would like to refer to the discussions and documents when working in other courses. I’ve had to tell them that that is impossible, so all they can do is try to copy and paste what they think they will need in the future, before the semester ends and they are locked out. It seems to me that having students think about and reevaluate what they learn in one class as they move on to other classes is something we should be encouraging!

I’d also like to put in a strong vote for the idea of having your own WordPress install. I certainly understand the ease and the appeal of having edublogs or wordpress.com host it for you, but when using WordPress as an LMS there are some extremely useful plugins (Tona rightly mentions ScholarPress above) for which you need full admin access.

To ScholarPress I would add DigressIt, which is an excellent tool for collaboratively annotating primary source material (or any kind of text).

And specifically to Jonathan’s point about private discussion forums, if you have your own install you can use the wonderful SimplePress Forum plugin. It gives a full-featured discussion board, right within your WordPress install. It’s got all the functionality of dedicated forum software (which means far more functionality than the Blackboard discussion boards), with the added huge advantage that it can be private or public, or various gradations in between, as you choose, for individual forums or groups of forums. Having a choice, and a conscious choice, about the open vs. closed question is so much better than the all or nothing approach which is usually enforced by an LMS.

I don’t use WordPress but use Blogger, though the principle is the same. I don’t delete the site but keep it up. When I teach the course, I’ll remove the syllabus and schedule and assignment prompts. Basically, I’ll delete all the links in the sidebar to course documents and post the ones for the new semester. The URL is the same.

I do this partly because I teach a lot of classes that people want to know about, so I keep the site up as a resource for other people interested in the same topics. The year-long humanities seminar I did last year on pain still gets dozens of hits each week, and a lot of those hits come from .edu domains, and that’s why it’s still up even though it’s a topic-oriented course that I’ll probably never teach, certainly not in that incarnation, again.