Blackboard sucks, but at least it takes some work out of being a professor. Making your own site takes extra work, and extra work on top of that to make it friendly for students. They both still win out over the atrocity that is the Respondus LockDown browser, which my school required for some tests. Google it. It's bad.
I guess I had the advantage of less "creative" professors. Most of them did pretty much the same thing with the course web site. Click the "Syllabus" link to see the syllabus, click the "Homework Assignments" link to see the list of problem sets, etc.
Is there anything you would find disagreeable or unfriendly about, e.g., the following?
http://www.math.sc.edu/~thornef/math142/
To my way of thinking, this is obviously the way to present my course materials. Any friction points I'm not thinking of?
Your course website looks very clear, easy to use, etc. (also, I like the approach you seem to be taking with the material, I learned from the same book and always thought the convergence test guesswork was silly)
Part of my personal frustration with custom Professor sites, and that of other students I know, is simply that it's yet another site to keep track of. For all the failings of large LMS's, they are effective at centralizing coursework into a location a student can check daily. When a few professors have custom sites, it's easy to forget to check one Prof's site for updates, announcements, etc. Even just for syllabus info, I have more than once gone to my LMS and groaned when I realized that I had to look up the address for a custom site or dig through bookmarks. I once had a semester where every Prof used their own site, and I had to cycle through 5 bookmarks daily to keep track of everything.
TL,DR: it's simply one more thing to keep track of, increasing the friction of information acquisition from a student's perspective.
It's worth noticing that this is a symptom of a much larger trend in academia: professors tend to be naturally siloed and need to put in effort for presenting themselves and discovering others' work. Journals seem to have some positive effect, but Elsevier seems to negate a lot of that effect.
Contrast this with something like the open source community, with its registries of projects and package managers and the current (long-lasting) trend towards platforms and APIs.
I think what I'm describing is what SCORM is supposed to be, but I've never actually used it, and I suspect SCORM is the XML of it. The "Yes, it does the job, but ohgodclunkymassivehugepain, save us Douglas Crockford, you're our only hope."
Okay, page impressions:
- Homework downloadable, awesome. - practice exams, awesome - I'd grab both of the above a year/semester ahead of time or from a different professor, in case you were to remove them and then dole them out throughout the course
- no downloadable notes, boo. But it's calc and I actually enjoyed the worked problems in the lectures so it's okay.
- not on Blackboard, yay! - this means I can easily use DownThemAll! to grab all the links you have - also, I can check out your page, so I know what to expect
- "[the text] has not changed since last year, so please feel free to buy a used version from an upperclassman." - Awesome
- "We will use a custom edition of this book, available in the campus bookstore" - Not cool. - on Amazon.com that used text is available for $10 - The campus bookstore has it available starting at $173 - Especially since that text is 90% problems which could be randomly generated by a CAS given appropriate parameters for each section. The remaining 10% is good, but your lectures and math tutors are probably better.
tl;dr:, I like your stand alone page, but I would be pretty upset about the textbook.
In my view, this is the differentiating factor between MySpace and Facebook. On MySpace you have a lot of control over the webspace -- and it's horrible and atrocious for the visitor to the page 99% of the time.
Facebook makes the layout standard, and this benefits visitors to pages because people can find the information they're looking for.
(I am not a UI/UX guy, take my thoughts with a grain of salt).
If you go back a decade, MySpace won the social network space because you had a lot of control over the webspace. Because setting up shop was more about expressing your personality online than about showing off your vacation pictures.
> (I am not a UI/UX guy, take my thoughts with a grain of salt).
Your thoughts are actually absolutely correct as long as you're not talking about social network sites. This is common wisdom in Information Architecture / User Experience. Which isn't surprising, since they wouldn't have a job otherwise.
That said, you're absolutely right. The system works perfectly well, but we are talking about a computer science department here and not a humanities department.
PS is Dr Latham still teaching and, more importantly, wearing those hideous shirts?
Oh yeah he is and, yes, still wearing Hawaiian shirts.
Here is your answer. In particular in the humanities. I had many professors who while they hated the software, were bad at using it and used it basically as a shared folder for powerpoint presentations, couldn't figure out a better solution. They felt that they were not skilled enough at technology to solve their problem on their own. Unable (and or unwilling) to create their own solution they bashed through with the software.
and now going to be downvoted by the blissful ignorant of how large universities works in the daily grinding of the gears.
I am a math professor at a university which uses it, and so I use it to mass e-mail my students and to record grades. And for nothing else.
I can see it has a billion other features but can't fathom wanting to use them. It looks like it is designed to make simple tasks tedious and clunky, and the article confirms this impression.
Is it that professors don't want to learn HTML and maintain simple course webpages? Are faculty trying to do some kind of automatic grading? Do administrations require profs to use the obscure features? Are ... ?