Biology Course Instructional Technology

Over the course of this year, I have been working to build and test a set of instructional technology resources that could be made universally available within the department. There are five sets of resources that I think would be particularly useful for everyone: (1) an easy way to post web-pages for courses, (2) a "web presence" for every course, (3) a course mailing list and archive, (4) an on-line calendar, and (5) a free-links page. I have set up these resources for every course that the biology department will teach in the fall:
   http://bcrc.bio.umass.edu/biol/

(Note: documentation is now available.)

1. Publishing Web Pages
   I have created a partition that can be mounted via Appleshare or NFS/Share. In this partition is a folder for each course. Instructors can simply drop text or HTML files into this folder to publish them on the web. Over the summer, I would be happy to work with any faculty who would like to explore using this resource.

2. A "Web Presence"
   At the moment each of the currently existing folders contains only a single page that points to the new BCRC resources. Note that the syllabus link is disabled, but can easily be re-enabled. Faculty are free to expand upon or customize these pages. Links to pages that faculty choose to create (and drop into their folder) can be added here or, if you don't want to learn HTML, via the Free Links page (see below).

3. Course Mailing Lists
   Majordomo has created an easy way for us to manage a large number of mailing lists. We have already created the lists -- all you need to do is subscribe and then give your students a hand-out that explains how they can subscribe. These lists are currently set up so that any one can subscribe any one else and post anything (which requires little or no active management). We can set up the lists so that subscription requests and submissions to the list require approval. We now have several years of collective experience in running course email lists and I hope over the summer to develop a set of materials that will help faculty get the most out of a course list.

4. On-Line Calendars
   If you have used the BCRC On-Line Registration System, then you've seen the calendar system. I have set up the biol100 calendar as a demonstration system that you can see what the calendar is like -- at the moment it is set up so that anyone can modify it. If you look at the calendar for the others, they are set up so that only people with special usernames and passwords can modify them. They are all set up with most of the relevant University holidays and events already added (go to September 1997). Faculty can put exam dates, study sessions, etc and be able to regularly update and modify the information over the course of the semester. There is currently just a single calendar for each course, but we can create more calendars for individual course sections.

5. Free Links page
   You may have seen the BCRC free links page (which is a place where anyone can add anything). I thought that such pages would be useful for courses as well. For a course, it could be used either as a place where only instructors put links or as a place where students could add links too. Several faculty have found this resource to be a useful mechanism for pointing to the resources that that they publish on the web obviating the need to learn any html. I have set these up as closed pages initially, meaning that only "authorized" people can add to them. For instructors that would like to make them more widely available, I can unrestrict the access.

(Note: documentation is now available.)