Virtually every online educator has dreams of creating their own interactive website. Some may be wishing they could host online forums where their students could discuss assignments and collaborate on projects. For others, having a centralized place for their students to blog or develop interlinked wikis would be on their “dream site.” What is on your dream site? Quizzes on your site so students don’t have to go off-site to finish their work? Surveys? Polls? A FAQ? An article repository?
Educators’ ideas and needs are as diverse as snowflakes, but most online instructors do realize the huge advantages to providing an interactive environment for their students: increased student involvement, development of cooperative learning skills, and greater instructor/student collaboration are only a few of the benefits that interactivity lends to online courses. (Milheim, 1995). In fact, without interactive elements online instructors are hard-pressed to provide the variety of experiences - student-to-student, student-to-instructor, and student-to-computer - that they would really benefit their learners.
One major obstacle to creating an interactive site, though, is that most of us can’t do the programming ourselves. As anyone who has worked with Dreamweaver, FrontPage, GoLive, or even Microsoft Word knows, it is in everyone’s reach to create nice text pages with images, nice formatting and even embedded YouTube videos. Unfortunately, even for experienced web page creators, it is an impossibly big step from nice text pages to programming an interactive forum. As soon as you look into what such a project requires you are bombarded with acronyms: PHP, ASP, MySQL, PostgreSQL, CSS. Clearly learning such programming is beyond what most instructors care to learn. So the question becomes: how do we bridge the gap between our vision of an interactive community website and our limited personal resources (time and money)?
The most common way to build this bridge is by creating links from your website to existing resources on the web. Need student blogs? Create a link to http://www.blogger.com. Need a place for students where students can collaborate on wikis? Set up a link to http://www.wikipages.com. Even chat rooms are available for free (with advertising) from sites like http://www.chatzy.com. The problem with outsourcing all of these elements is the diffusing effect it has on the online community you are hoping to develop in the first place. With their work spread all over the internet, it is far more complicated for students to explore the work of their fellow learners, less likely that they will peruse the wikis created by other groups, and less likely they will coalesce into a high-functioning group.
Fortunately, a better way to bridge this gap is available in the form of Open-Source Content Management Systems (CMS). Working with a CMS is much like working on a new course in the Blackboard LMS, which many online educators some have experience with. With a CMS as the framework for your site, adding discussion boards is as easy as enabling them in an administrator panel. In addition, many CMSs contain the ability to enable a broad range of interactive tools, including student blogs, wikis, polls and quizzes. All without any programming on your part!
This dream-come-true is not without a few hurdles though. (You knew that was coming, right?) In fact, there are four steps to setting up your CMS website: planning, selecting a CMS, installing the software on a web server, and configuring the interactive elements you want to use in via an administrator control panel.
Step one of this process is the dreaded planning step. While planning is a step that is often skipped, you’ll need the information from this step to select a CMS in the next step. So don’t skip it! The easiest way to approach planning is to write down the interactive elements that would improve your existing classes, or that you currently outsource to other sites; forums, blogs, wikis, newsletters, and event calendars are all common requirements.
Step two of the CMS implementation process is selecting a CMS, a step that is quite a bit easier because of the prior planning you did in step one. Fortunately, there is a great comparison website built just for this purpose: http://www.cmsmatrix.org. Though the site contains 852 possible CMSs, they have a “Narrow the Matrix” feature to allow you to browse only the ones that contain the features that fit your needs. Some of the CMSs I’ve personally set up and configured are ocPortal (http://www.ocportal.org ), drupal (http://www.drupal.org) and Moodle (http://moodle.org). All three have administrative control panels that are very easy to use and tutorials to help you through the whole process. Other popular CMSs are WebGUI, DotNukeNet, Fantastico, OpenEdit, Plone, Mambo and the Open-Source LMS, Moodle (see the appendix at the end for website URLs for these CMS developers).
Step three of setting up your CMS site is by far the most daunting for most teachers: installing the software on a web server. Some CMSs like ocPortal make it fairly easy to install the software yourself, directly from their website. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be a commonly available option, so if a quick perusal of the installation instructions for a particular CMS sends you running for hills, consider asking a tech-savvy friend to assist. Lacking such a friend, your best bet is to work with the CMS developers to have someone install the site for you. Many Open-Source CMSs will have a referral procedure for connecting you with someone who can install the site for you for a nominal fee (that doesn’t include configuring the whole thing for you: that’s extra!) The last option, which is also very easy to do but may not be the cheapest, is to arrange to host your website on a server hosted by, or recommend by, the CMS developer. This service usually comes with a monthly fee for the web space but lets you skip the whole installation process and jump straight to the fun part in step four: making the website your own.
Luckily for all of us, the final step of this process, step four, is much easier than previous one. And more fun! Once the installation of the software is complete on the web server, you’ll be able to log in and access the administrator control panel. Here is where you can set up your site’s name, color scheme (theme), and all the elements that inspired you to undertake this process in the first place; forums, blogs, wikis, polls, quizzes, featured articles, chat rooms - you pick. Best of all, no matter what elements you add the whole thing will look as if it were done by a professional, which in fact it was; an educational professional — you!
The whole four-step process will take a little time, but the results are worth it. Instead of a static site, you have a fully interactive, community-building website. Now, isn’t that worth a little of your time?
by Mary McCanta
References
Milheim, W. D. (1995). Interactivity and computer-based instruction. Journal of Educational Technology Systems, 24 (3), pp. 225-233.
Appendix
Choosing a CMS
CMS Matrix - http://www.cmsmatrix.org.
When using the “Narrow the Matrix” form at this site, you can use enter the term “GPL” in the “Licensing” field. GPL stands for General Public License, a commonly used licensing agreement for Open-Source software, and by limiting your search to Open-Source products you ensure that you will get the CMS you want for at no charge.
CMS Developers Mentioned in this Article (alphabetically)
drupal http://www.drupal.org
ocPortal http://www.ocportal.org
DotNukeNet http://www.dotnetnuke.com
Fantastico http://www.netenberg.com/fantastico.php
Mambo http://www.mamboserver.com
Moodle (an Open-Source LMS) http://moodle.org
OpenEdit http://www.openedit.com/
Plone http://plone.org
WebGUI http://www.webgui.org