Summer 2010 CoursePlus Update
The summer 2010 update to CoursePlus is now online. The big addition in this update is the addition of the wiki tool to CoursePlus. Wikis have been a part of online courses at the School for a couple of years now. We wanted to see how they were used in online courses and adjust the tool appropriately before rolling it out to CoursePlus.
What's a wiki and why would you use it? Here's a quick overview:
The wiki tool allows you to create and share a collection of Web pages, called wikis, within a class Web site. The focus of wikis is on shared Web pages, creating content on the Web, not in Word or PowerPoint files. Faculty and TAs set up the wikis in each CoursePlus site. Faculty and TAs control who can write in a specific wiki, and they also control who gets to read a wiki. All wikis to which you have read or write access are listed on the main wiki page in your CoursePlus site.
Wikis are often used for group activities, and the posting and sharing of content by students where you want other students to comment (online) on what is posted. One of the most powerful features of a wiki is that everyone can see all the edits and changes made to a wiki over time, so faculty and TAs can see who really contributed in the development of a wiki, and students can see all the versions of the wiki that they helped create.
There's a full set of step-by-step documentation, including a Quick Start guide, in the wiki tool itself. The Instructional Designers at the Center for Teaching and Learning with Technology are also available to assist you in figuring out how to make wikis an effective part of your course instructional design.
The other main feature of this update is specifically designed for faculty who teach at the School of Arts and Sciences (Homewood) or other schools at the University who also use CoursePlus. In the past, faculty who created "non-JHSPH course catalog CoursePlus sites" for their course had to manually give students in their course access to their CoursePlus site. We've added a tool, only for these "non-JHSPH course catalog CoursePlus sites," that allows faculty to take a course roster from ISIS and import it in to their CoursePlus site. The tool will take the Excel file of your roster from ISIS, read through it, and put any students it can match from the roster in your CoursePlus site. Students will still need JHSPH eLearning accounts, but the process of adding them to your non-JHSPH course catalog CoursePlus site just got a whole lot faster.
As you begin to work with these new tools, please let us know if you have any questions or feedback about how they work!