Teaching college students online

Posted Tuesday, 19 August 2008, 10:20 HST @764

I started teaching online courses at my university back in January 2005. This morning’s Honolulu Star-Bulletin features an article about Honolulu universities and their online programs - see Online classes on the rise. As I pointed out in my billso.com articles of 14 July 2008 called Rising gas prices fuel online course enrollments, students are willing to take an online course to save time and money.

I’ve used several different systems to manage these courses:

Moodle, which I used in the spring of 2005, is an free open source system. It has some good features, including extensive use of RSS feeds. However, the Moodle software has always been a work in progress, so some of its features seem flaky and unstable.
TurnItIn.com actually has an excellent gradebook system included in the service. I’ve been using that system for the last 3 years. My students seem to prefer this gradebook, but a handful of students have commented that they’d rather use WebCT.

But I haven’t used WebCT as my primary CMS (course management system) for an online course. I’m going to give WebCT another try this fall. Perhaps it has improved after 3 years.