Comments on: What To Do When Your Course Management System Goes Down

By: Bill Gibson, II

Bill Gibson, II — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 20:56:02 +0000

Since you are already familiar with Wordpress, you already have a pretty powerful tool for taking up the slack in the event of an institutional CMS Crash.

You could create a "category" for each course ("PHIL101.02") you teach during a semester and require your students to subscribe to the RSS feed. You assign one or more course categories to a posting and it gets pushed out appropriately. In the event that email goes down you can still carry on a generic dialogue with the class, which could get you through a 3 day system burp.

You can password protect documents as necessary, or if necessary, and possible, lock down a WP course site, just as you do in Angel/Blackboard/Moodle. Depending on who's hosting your instance of WP(MU), you may have plugins that provide most the functionality that you normally have in Angel. Embedding YouTube video, audio, PowerPoint, Excel, PDFs, etc.

If the campus network goes nuts, and you have one or more sites (3 GB free account) on Wordpress.com, you could still work from there. Yes, each student would at least have to have an account there (if you're going to create a private course site), but they wouldn't need to create their own site if they didn't wish to.

By: Gordon Marie

Gordon Marie — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 21:59:10 +0000

I was looking for a good attendance system. Thanks for the recomendation.

By: The Last Bit of Summer: The Prof. Hacker Week in Review

The Last Bit of Summer: The Prof. Hacker Week in Review — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 03:09:50 +0000

[...] support: Ethan explains what to do when Blackboard goes down, Amy describes her use of DevonThink and WordPress, and George announces a series on scheduling and [...]

By: Nels P. Highberg

Nels P. Highberg — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 17:47:19 +0000

Yes, it’s true that many don’t write, at least when I’ve done this. Frankly, I just don’t care at that point. I know I’ve done my best, and the rest is up to them. I had open-note quizzes last week, and there were those who were completely lost because they never contacted me to get the material. They have been on the ball since, though!

By: GC Fiedler

GC Fiedler — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 01:49:59 +0000

Ha-ha! I've tried that and find that I spend more time reminding students to email me than doing cryptology to figure out what a written email address is.

The other thing is that students often sign up to our university's system with an email other than the account they actually use on a regular basis. So, even if I can get their emails at the beginning of the term, they won't get messages.

For Cardinal, she/he could just write up a single link on the white/chalkboard or PP slide during lecture. Then she tells students they need to use that link to get their content and it's their responsibility to do so. If they don't attend lecture that day, so be it.

By: Nels P. Highberg

Nels P. Highberg — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 01:40:49 +0000

Cardinal, you might consider writing your email address on the board and telling students to email you for the link. Then you can just hit reply, paste the URL in the email, and they’ve got it. Sounds like you’ll get hundreds of emails, but it also sounds like hitting reply and pasting in a link will take less time than typing in each address specifically.

By: Cardinal

Cardinal — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 13:50:30 +0000

We’re on to day 6 of our CMS (some accursed “upgrade” to Blackboard) being completely inaccessible. I have been putting all the important links and documents on a hand-coded webpage hosted on a departmental server, but the tricky part has been getting the word out the students, since the only access to one’s class roster is via, you guessed it, the CMS. It adds to my workload considerably to have to gather hundreds of students’ e-mail addresses on paper and type them into my mail program, not to mention the potential for transcription errors.

By: Lisa

Lisa — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 03:52:58 +0000

George, I still hear (and sometimes say) 1995 and 1975 on a regular basis! Guess some of those “old” technologies never really die. And of course, the greatest library fire of all time turned out to be probably apocryphal.

That said, I think there are important philosophical/pedagogical reasons for seeking alternatives to CMSs. I wrote a little about it to explain to my students at at my course blog: http://hotbookwsu.wordpress.com/about-the-blog/ It might be summed up as teaching in public.

By: GC Fiedler

GC Fiedler — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 23:21:44 +0000

I think the problem with most university content systems is that they actually make things unnecessarily complicated and aren’t saving students or faculty any time.

By: George H. Williams

George H. Williams — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 21:07:36 +0000

1995: Man, you should have been there when the photocopier broke down. Talk about pandemonium!

1985: What?! The mimeograph's not working again!

1975: Who took all the chalk without replacing it!

1965: Now that the power's out, I guess we should cancel classes. Can't teach in the dark!

...

1725: What do you mean there aren't any knives to cut quills?!

1666: The fire in the library destroyed everything! Now what do we do?

=)

It's always a good idea to have a backup plan and remember that the old ways still work.

By: john

john — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 20:31:19 +0000

It always amazes me how reliant we’ve become on technology, cell phones, email… I wonder how things worked before course management systems?

By: JoannaOC

JoannaOC — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 03:03:28 +0000

I create a group email address for each of my classes at the beginning of the term because I don’t like using the CMS email feature. If we were down for a few days, I’d break out the chalk and punt. It would only really be an issue if an assignment were due to be submitted online,but then I’d ask them to either email it or hand it in the old fashioned way.