Designing online courses for free

Keven Schouten actually has this session online. So now I’m free to just provide amusing commentary instead of trying furiously to get the details down.

Sounds like he’s basically going to introduce free ways to create alternatives to Bloackboard and WebCT. First one that he brought up was Moodle, which is obviously the most well known Open Source solution. He also mentions Bodington, which I haven’t heard of before. Another site to look into! New information makes me happy.

Interesting. He has a list of steps/activities detailing how to go about a ‘thematic content page’, which sounds basically like a educational home page.

He’s got a list of online collections of resources for teachers. He suggests going to those instead of using search engines. While I agree that these sorts of archives are great, I’m also a firm believer in teaching people to fish rather than giving them fish. Pure and simple, it doesn’t take long to go through a directory like that. And rarely are they ever really up to date. They may be good starting points, but I think learing to search well is more important in the long run.

Onwards to online groups, and he’s reccomending yahoo groups and msn groups. He said that he thought about adding blogs to this section, but that free blog engines don’t have the security he would want. Methinks he hasn’t looked into it quite enough. He mentioned that there was no way to make some content private and other content public. WordPress definitely supports this, and has pretty decent security options. Blogmeister definitely has fantastic options for teachers, I’ll have to reccomend it to him afterwards. Additionally, pmachine pro is now completely free and has tons of features for security and user control.

He has a few links to sites that provide free online storage space. I’ll have to look into those. Can always use free online storage space

Here’s a prime example of what I was talking about a few sessions ago. He says that once you have your space, and you’ve created your fields, you can just login to the server using ftp and upload the files. For a person who has never done this sort of thing before, that’s a HUGE over simplification. FTP is not intuitive to someone who has never been exposed to it.

Had to chip in a bit and plug Dave Warlick’s stuff. Mentioned PiNet Library and Blogmeister. To be honest, after watching this presentation so far, I really have to say that blogs seem to be to the best way to create online content for free.