Curricular Web Page Issues

A Course Web Site

Creating a web site for your course can be much more than just a tool for persuading your students you're technologically "with it". Web sites have several strengths that play well to particular pedagogic goals. If you focus your site on exploiting these strengths you'll find a simple web site can enhance communications with your students.

What are course web sites good for?

A course web site is primarily a one-way communication tool. It allows you to present information to your students in a way that is not constrained by a class schedule. You can update information at any time and students can access and review the information at any time.

This makes it an excellent tool for recording and disseminating administrative course details. You can put traditional course syllabus material in a course web site. As schedules change and assignments are recast the course web site can serve as a reference for what's current, both for you and your students. A course web site is also an obvious place to put references to supplementary materials: a few carefully chosen web links or references to print materials. If you're putting together your own materials-problem sets, essay questions, data sets, consider creating them in web format to start with. This may not be the best choice for materials you already have in non-web format, or materials with complex formatting. But many simpler materials are as easy to put together in a web editor as in a word processor. And a document on the web is easier for everyone to access than one tucked away on your office computer.

Web sites are most effective when they are dynamic and growing throughout the term. If the site looks the same on the last day of classes as it did on the first students will have little reason to visit more than once. You may even want to create a "complete" site at the beginning of the term but only reveal it in stages as your progress through the related material.

New material that draws students to a page includes discussion questions for tomorrow's class, study hints for next week's test, a quick summary of a question and answer that came up during an office hour discussion. These resources can help keep students engaged in the material outside the minutes they spend in class. A course web site can also serve as a starting point for other course communication tools. In additional to the normal contact information found on a syllabus your web site might include a link to a course-related Caucus web page (if you're using this online discussion system in your class). Or it might provide guidelines about the organization of files being shared in a class folder on Fabio.

What are the limitations of course web site?

Of course a web site is not the be-all and end-all of electronic tools. Web communication is pretty much one way. You can summarize and post information from students but real dialog is better served by tools like Caucus. Free exchange of computer files (word documents, spreadsheets, pictures) is better facilitated by a course folder on Fabio. The web is quite limited in how information is presented. Plain text works great. More complicated layouts, while possible, are quite time consuming to create. Web pages also tend to print poorly and irregularly. What you see on the page is rarely what comes out of the printer. If distributing information with complicated formatting is important, and especially if you expect many people will want printed copies you'll want to look into creating your files in Acrobat format for distribution from your site.

Who can see your site?

By default web pages are viewable around the world. Carleton students, potential Carleton students, alumni, parents and educators around the world may be viewing your pages. You'll want to keep this in mind as you judge what is (and isn't) appropriate for your site. This has particular implications if you're posting materials that may be copyrighted. Fair use (an important topic far too broad to cover here) may allow you to distribute particular materials to your students. But if the materials are placed on a web page you may be moving beyond fair use as you are distributing the material to the world (intentionally or not).

On the flip side keep in mind that there may be those who want to use materials you've developed. The web makes it very easy for them to grab your materials for both appropriate and inappropriate use.

It's quite straight-forward to limit you web pages (or some subset) so that they are only accessible on-campus (or even protected with a password). Though keep mind that students living in private housing may not be getting internet access through Carleton and so may be locked out of the material as well.

What's most important?

Who will be drawn to your site? What will they get out of it? Make sure you have clear answers to these questions before you start. Will the site contain unique and required course materials compelling your students to visit? If not why will they come? When they get there what will they learn that they won't get elsewhere?

Where can I get further information?

Your coordinator is always a good source of up-to-date information especially about the particulars of web technology at Carleton.

For more information, see the Creating Course Web Pages document in this collection.