With the transition from Blackboard to Sakai underway this year at Duke and with the availability of WordPress and other tools at the university, now is a good time to think about which online tools are the best fit for activities in your course. Although the tools offer some similar features, each offers distinct functions to help with specific types of course tasks.
Sakai is a learning management system – online software that has been in use for a number of years in schools and colleges to manage a broad range of class activities. Sakai is connected to enrollments for your course, so you can very quickly get started with communicating with students, designing group activities or assignments online. With Sakai, you can:
- have ready access to tools to send announcements to students in your course or send emails to individuals or groups of students
- create an online calendar of course activities that students can integrate into their own calendar program on their computer or portable device
- allow students to engage in threaded, subject-based online discussions
- administer tests and quizzes that can be automatically graded by Sakai
- manage electronic submission and grading of papers or other types of files by students
- create areas for offering documents or files for download by students or file spaces where they can share documents.
WordPress is another new tool at Duke and differs from Sakai in several ways. WordPress is online software designed for creating blogs – web pages that can contain an ongoing “journal” of entries written by one or more people.
Sakai includes a very simple blogging tool, but WordPress gives you several more options that can work well for some courses. Like Sakai, students can be automatically enrolled in a course WordPress site. However, the focus is on creating blog posts and static pages for a course web site. WordPress doesn’t include features for tests or quizzes, a gradebook, turning in assignments, discussion boards, sharing files or email.
WordPress course sites have students automatically enrolled in the role of authors so that they can create posts and comment on each other’s work. The posts are viewed on a WordPress site in reverse chronological order, with the most recent seen on the front page of the site, and the use of tags attached to posts can allow readers to view posts on related topics. However, posts and comments are not “threaded” by subject as they are in the Forum discussion board tool in Sakai.
Activities that work well in WordPress include:
- having students create ongoing blogs or personal journals as a class or group, with all their posts collated into one blog, or individually in their own WordPress site,
- getting students to comment on each other’s work,
- creating a set of “static” web pages to offer a syllabus, links, and other simple content to students for reference during the course
- having student blog posts or a course site that can be public and have comments left by individuals not taking the class.
WordPress sites at Duke can be limited to use only by members of a course or can be made public – some courses use it as an opportunity to create a web presence for a class and solicit community engagement in student work. Some courses also include non-Duke “guests” that create content on a blog or comment on student posts.
Some faculty use both Sakai and WordPress in their courses, using only some of the Sakai tools, such as the gradebook or tests and quizzes, and making a link to their Sakai course site in WordPress for the convenience of the students.
If you would like more information on using Sakai or WordPress in your courses, contact the Center for Instructional Technology to set up an appointment with one of our consultants.