The course site project hung over my head for months. I didn’t know what was expected — I couldn’t find any statement of what the site assignment entailed. An entire course? Consisting of what? (This goes back to my frustration with 565’s organization and navigability.) I did some work on the site assignment in early March, then gave up for a while.
It was only in reading the content pages for Module 5: Multimedia that I finally found a sketchy list of the criteria. I say sketchy because what, for example, is a “splash page” in this context? I associate “splash” with Flash. So I spent hours building a Flash animation conveying some suggestion of the history of information, only to find that I couldn’t upload it into Moodle. And YouTube doesn’t accept SWFs. Lacking access to an external server to host this animation, I abandoned it.
So I adapted it into a banner. But what’s a “GUI” in this context? I associate GUIs with javascript, but lacking access to the <head> of Moodle webpages, I couldn’t use javascript. So I built a table, to serve as a GUI of the course pages and activities. But this meant I couldn’t have a “module programmed for selective release.” And so on.
Anyway… MY COURSE SITE illustrates my conception of an eight-week part-time course (i.e., a component of a first-year English course) to teach students the rudiments of information literacy for the purposes of undergraduate study — how to research a paper, use databases, determine what’s a good source, incorporate sources into a paper, etc.
Besides meeting the criteria, I was interested in two aspects in particular: (a) navigability; and (b) the ability to upload or embed learning objects into the course pages.