Over at Campus Technology, Ryan Tansey makes a suggestion for professors using course-management systems like Blackboard and Sakai: If you want your course Web site to work, don’t hedge your bets.
Mr. Tansey, who graduated this spring from the University of Puget Sound, says that his least rewarding experiences with Blackboard came under professors who posted to their sites only sporadically:
It was especially frustrating when a faculty member would not require students to sign up for the Blackboard instance of the course. More than once, a faculty member might post an assignment that a substantial portion of the class would never see.
Like many students, Mr. Tansey has plenty of good things to say about course-management systems. But Blackboard is often “underutilized” at his university, he argues, because professors aren’t getting the organized training they need to take advantage of the system. —Brock Read
