Support instructors/teachers/professors using DW for class-related projects

[denise]

Title:
Support instructors/teachers/professors using DW for class-related projects

Area:
posting, communities, using DW to conquer the world

Summary:
We get at least three or four instructors per semester asking for promo codes for account creations for their classes (which we're always happy to give!) Since DW is so well-suited to keeping class journals, submitting writing assignments, or requiring class participation, I'd love to be able to code some more support for academic use.

Description:
Obviously each teacher's use of DW would be different, depending on the type of class they're teaching and the level at which they're teaching it (high school, undergrad, graduate work, adult enrichment, etc). This suggestion is less "we should add this" and more "we should brainstorm what we can add that would actually be most helpful".

I'm basically proposing a new category of accounts: "instructor accounts" or "academic accounts" and "student accounts" or "learner accounts" (names obviously subject to change, yadda). This will allow us to set different capabilities for these accounts.

The "academic package" would consist of:

* one promo code per class/class section;
* one "academic community" account per section, with slight changes to the standard community model to make them more appropriate for teacher/class interaction;
* one (or more if co-taught or if class has a TA) "instructor account" to be the admin of the community (or the instructor could use their standard DW account, but all of the instructors I know don't want their students finding their regular DW account!)
* a number of "student accounts" created via the promo code, where the students can choose their own usernames and migrate the student account to a standard account later if they'd like.

Things I can think of, off the top of my head:

* the ability for the instructor to "clear out" a community's posts and comments, moving them to some form of archive (essentially a community rename?) each semester/quarter/marking period/etc in order to store each semester's classwork separately and start each semester with a blank slate

* ability to force a student account created with a specific promo code to be subscribed to/a member of the community for the project, without having to check the checkbox during account creation

* ability to designate an instructor account for each "academic package" that will automatically subscribe to any account created from the promo code (so the instructor won't 'lose' students or have to get them to submit their username to the instructor through some other method)

* ability for the instructor to subscribe to all posts and comments made in the community (without the comm needing to be a paid community, I mean)

What other things would instructors using DW for academic/teaching purposes want to see, or would find useful?

(Edited to remove poll #7997, since this is more of an information-gathering entry than a suggestion!)

Comments

[jumpuphigh]

I think it would be helpful for students to be able to auto-subscribe to tracking all comments on comm posts as well so that they can follow/participate in conversations.

[foursweatervests]

Ability to keep the comm only viewable to those with a code/invite. (Apologies if this is already possible.)

[busaikko]

I teach jr/sr high, so students who are not adults. The ability for the instructor to age-lock the student accounts in some way would be good. This could be difficult if the accounts are non-expiring or if, at the end of the term/year accounts can be rolled over into regular accounts. ("Ms. Teacher, my son used the account you gave him to read porn!") (It might be better to actually make this a university deal at first *ponders*)

Some kind of export function, preferably to PDF, for posts and comments, preferably selectable by tags (so for example, you could print to PDF all posts tagged "Creative Writing Project", but not "brainstorming" or "teacher announcements"). This would be great for making class books, and for keeping feedback.

[kyrielle]

What about a student who is in multiple courses using this, either over the course of one term or several, but doesn't want to accumulate Dreamwidth accounts like some kind of trading card? Some system for a student to take the code they were given and tie it to their existing account, thus being allowed (forced) into the class community and signed up, might be good....

I do not know how instructors have used or might use Dreamwidth. But would the ability for the student accounts to post "instructor-visible-only" posts in the community (as an option, that the instructor could enable or not) potentially be useful?

[tinyjo]

I was going to offer some suggestions for ways to make it more usable with the children I teach, but then I remembered that of course they're all <13 so actually, that's not feasible/relevant - ah well.

PS Not intended to be a passive aggressive whine - I totally understand why you don't want to tangle with COPPA :) It's just that with so many of my 11 year old students having Facebook, etc accounts, it's easy to forget what the legal restrictions are!

[existence]

One thing I can think might be useful is the ability to have certain categories of pages that may or may not change with each semester "wipe." Like syllabus, or readings, or other material links. This may be covered better with shiny things to come to the site in general, though.

[beatrice_otter]

Having participated in a couple of online courses, I can think of a few things. first, it needs to be really easy to PM people (like, have links on the sidebar to PM each person in the class). Because there's a lot of discussion, yes, but there's also a lot of needing to talk to a specific person about specific things that you don't want to clutter up the main group. Second, it needs to be really easy to download stuff (syllabi, articles, videos, etc.) Also, there needs to be group settings within the class--some way to facilitate group projects, small group discussion, etc. For example, the ability for the instructor to post a question/discussion topic that actually posts x number of times (x being the number of small groups) and each person only gets the one for their particular group show up on their reading page. Or for the link-on-the-side thing, links to PM the instructor and PM each group (where sending a PM to that group automatically sends the message out to everyone in the group, and replies automatically go to everyone in the group). Those would probably require some fancy coding, but that's the only function of the class websites I've used that DW doesn't duplicate already in some way.

[foxfirefey]

Quite possible the ability to automatically subscribe/access every member in the class to every other member of the class. Don't know if it needs to be enforced (aka, journals would be able to unsubscribe/unaccess afterwards), but it might be nice and help clear initial hurdles of having everybody do it manually.

[feathertail]

How about an informal usability study of some kind (even just a survey) focusing on how they use Dreamwidth, and/or a theme designed just for them?

[deborah]

As an instructor, it would be really important to me to have a straightforward way to export all of the student work at the end of the semester into a simple, readable, platform-independent format.

[deborah]

oh, and also, integration with Sakai and Moodle would make a huge difference. Although my teaching is at a school that uses Blackboard, so it wouldn't help me, unfortunately.

Pipe dream here, but a way to forward authentication from some LDAP/active directory-based system so the students wouldn't need to login multiple times.

[deborah]

I know this conversation is old, but now that I'm into the semester, I've thought of some more things that I would really like as an instructor:

1. The ability to have certain posts that are drafts and can be seen only by the creator and the instructor, until both the creator and the instructor mark them as published for everyone to see.

2. The ability to assign group work. I'm not sure what this would really mean any dreamwidth framework, but maybe if everyone in the course could be put into sections where things which are limited to creator are limited to all of them. Communities would take care of this, possibly with some wiggling.

3. The ability to grade posts, which would have to be visible only to instructor and creator. Probably the best way to go about this would be integration with Sakai and Moodle, so you are using LMS grading tools instead of trying to write a whole new grading system into dreamwidth.

4. Okay, this one is going to be controversial, but. The ability for the instructor to see which logged in users have viewed a thread. Maybe when this is turned on there could be some kind of banner at the top of the page which indicates that your reading is being tracked in the appropriate communities, I don't know. But right now I would really like to know which of my students are reading the discussions in Blackboard, even if they aren't participating, and that's not a feature I currently have.

[mirthalia]

The ability for the instructor to set alerts for certain posts (ie. assignment posts) that will go out to all members subscribed to said post. Instant upcoming-deadline notification for students.

Some way to privately submit text assignments to the instructor outside of using screened comments, maybe. Though I can't quite think of how at the moment.

All that aside, this is a brilliant use for the DW service. A++.