I'll blog this one session at a time. Instead of summarizing too much, I'll do what I usually do in my head, which is think of questions, comments.
The richness of your institution is behind a password if you use a LMS. That's really an interesting thought and one of the reasons I'm pursuing Open CourseWare.
Internal and external needs are very different. How do you reconcile the needs of those two audiences? The interface of many LMSs are not so attractive. Prospective students equate the look of the web site with the way your institution functions. If it's ugly and disorganized, then students think that your school is. Is that necessarliy wrong? Students look at the web site as a whole, so when department sites look different, that causes confusion.
The web developer who is now part of the Teaching and Learning side of things has been dragged into managing department web sites. Has tried to push that off on students. That model is not really working for him. Trying to move departmental web sites into Blackboard, with a publicly viewable version. Aside: working with the PR office is sometimes painful.
Trying to automate the process and pull data from the student information system. Certain pieces would be available to the public--department sites and on the course level, the syllabus. We've been talking about this for a while, and have been somewhat successful. Of course, sharing our CMS with Swat and Haverford makes it harder for us to make Blackboard our web site.
Incorporated job ads into Blackboard. That's pretty cool. Now they have general classifieds in there. Don't work in isolation, make sure you're not repeating efforts.
Now we're looking at the events calendar. Worked with a third company to connect organizations within Blackboard to the main events calendar. It occurs to me that we have a ton of separate applications that do similar things. It might be worth having more conversations with people on campus about how to allow different ways of doing things, but providing some centralized place to view things. Pulling data from different places.
Issues: A lot of independent republics--I love this phrase--which makes collaboration is hard. Technological vision doesn't always exist at the higher levels which makes it hard to bring balkanized groups together. When resources are scarce, there's a tendancy to stagnate.
Things to think about: there's a lot of information in your LMS that is valuable to an external audience. Consider style plus substance. You need buy-in.
Discussion: Portal systems or content management systems? They're evaluating content management systems now.
How do important projects get the attention of upper-level administration? Hope College's web site got picked up by web pages that suck which finally got someone's attention. I don't think our site would ever get close to that. What are ideas for "skinning" Blackboard or another CMS? Hard to make the site look really, really great.
technorati tags:lmslac2006
