Session description
It's a simple idea: use WordPress to compose course materials and electronic textbooks. It sound like it should be easy! This talk will describe the challenges of implementing this idea at a large Australian university, and how it grew from a simple resource-sharing site to enterprise level software used by hundreds of instructors.
Takeaways include:
- Instructors use a diverse variety of content, each with its own coding, formatting and accessibility challenges.
- Such a site needs to be scaled to handle the first week of classes, which drives several times as much traffic as the remainder of the semester.
- Sharing and reusing content among instructors requires trust and customized permissions set-ups.
- A multiple-level content hierarchy results in a literal "cascading" approach to copyright licenses.
Presenter
Mark P Ciotola
Mark Ciotola a lecturer in the School of Design at San Francisco State University. He also instructs online at Swinburne University of Technology (Australia) and has taught at Monash University (Australia). Mark is also currently on the Alexandria Repository team at Monash University. The Alexandria Repository is a highly-customized Wordpress site to compose, organize, manage and publish course contents. He is also a Entrepreneur in Residence at Singularity University. Mark has a B.A. (Economics) from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, B.A. (Physics) and M.B.A. from San Francisco State University and a J.D from the University of New Hampshire. His research concerns developing a science of human history and its implications for sustainability.
Sessions
- General Lecture Session: Case Study: Using WordPress to Compose and Publish Online Courses and Textbooks