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"The un(?)intended consequences of courseware"
12/02/2003 Entry
[I am now posting entries at Crooked Timber. See this post - including follow-up comments - there.]
Five years ago when a few savvy instructors rushed to integrate the Web into their teaching and put their syllabi online the idea exchange so crucial to academia was alive and well in the teaching realm of our work. A few years later, witness how various password-protected courseware adopted by so many campuses is making it increasingly impossible to see others’ teaching materials. Sure, some people may not want to share their syllabi, but I suspect many wouldn’t mind. Regardless, the increasing proliferation of these services makes the teaching side of our work less and less visible to a wider audience. So while blogs may be opening some aspects of teaching, courseware is closing others.
In the summer of 1999 I gave a talk on a panel at the American Sociological Association meetings about the use of the Web in teaching. I was reporting on my experiences having built an extensive Web site for a class on the Sociology of Latin America: Mexico and Cuba. (Don’t laugh, if you take a look. That wasn’t so bad for a 1998 Web site.) One of my advisors had hired me on a special grant to build a Web site that was especially elaborate with lots of resources. I included numerous links to relevant materials including lots of images. We even tried out having a weekly quiz based on online content. Reactions from students were quite positive, on the whole.
One of the people in the audience of the panel at the ASA meetings inquired how people would be able to do create such Web sites if they didn’t have special grants to hire grad students for compiling them. I replied that the nice thing about the Web is that one could share the wealth. Once posted by someone the site would be available for others to use as well.
Flash forward less than five years and this is increasingly rare. Courseware at most schools is password-protected. At my university, I can’t even look at the course Web sites of other faculty in my own school. (This is based on local decisions though as at my previous univ I could log onto any course’s site.)
There are some exceptions. MIT’s OpenCourseWare makes many of their course materials public. But this seems increasingly uncommon. The Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies has a long list of online syllabi. But notice that the number of course links seems to be decreasing. There could be numerous reasons for this, of course, but part of it may have to do with syllabi disappearing behind members-only systems.
Although I may adopt our courseware for teaching because it does offer some helpful features (e.g. automatic class list for easily communicating with all enrolled students), I plan to post copies of my syllabi on the open Web as well in case anyone may be curious. Here’s the course I just compiled on the Social Implications of Communication and Information Technologies. Since it’s a course I had never taken myself, I was very interested in finding related syllabi out there.. but unfortunately bumped into a few password-protected sites along the way.
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