The lost of impact, and sharing with the world, that results from our classes disappearing inside opaque, crappy “courseware” systems is really sad. I used to find my slides in use at lots of schools, especially small ones.
I shan’t be using these systems going forward.
@blair yes, these LMSes (learning management systems, in the horrible bureaucraticese) push against the open web and only serve to make it harder to share educational materials and ideas.
@dancohen I've been doing this rant every time I teach, for years. It's infuriating. I use ours only for grades, and put all my materials on wordpress sites (from 2013 onward). Most of the pre-2010 sites are still hosted on www.cc.gatech.edu, fortunately; I need to copy those to my own space for safety.
@blair @dancohen Curious if there’s any material out there about (the history of/impetus for) professors’ movement from having their websites on university servers to at their own domains? I hadn’t really thought about it before seeing this conversation. I suppose there are currents both from the larger technology/society side of things and also those specific to developments inside academia?
(Regarding crappy courseware, I remember my undergraduate alma mater was an early adopter of Blackboard(?) because the new CIO came from the school where it was originally invented, so he foisted it upon us, although mercifully it was barely used at that time.)
@smokey I don’t know if anything looking at this. We don’t get pressured one way or the other at GT; for most people, it’s simply that the LMS is the path of least resistance (I’ll be using some features like the grade entry; so a second system is more work).
@blair Thanks; I didn’t think it would have been a hot topic for study, but it never hurts to ask. (It’s obviously been a long time since I was in academia; back then, having one’s profess(ion|ori)al site on a university server lent a certain creditbility and cachet, whereas now many of the academics I’m familiar with have those sites at their own personal domains, which seemed like a big shift.)
Glad to hear that Tech is not pressuring people to use the crappy courseware, though :-)
@blair @dancohen @smokey This is fascinating—I hadn’t thought about the impact of this before. I suppose there’s an argument for keeping things centralized so it isn’t confusing to find material in one place and grades in another. That’s also an argument against things like Flipgrid, which I have been using anyway.
But, hm, yeah, the argument for open knowledge is an important one that I’m going to have to noodle on.