[p2pu-dev] [school-of-open] Preparing for second run: some platform reflections
Rebecca Kahn
bekka at p2pu.org
Thu May 2 08:24:01 UTC 2013
Hi Peter
This is really great feedback, thank you so much! I've added the P2Pu
community and tech team in here, because I think this discussion has
relevance for all of us too - and I'd be interested to hear other people's
opinions.
Best
Bekka
On 2 May 2013 05:31, Pete Forsyth <peteforsyth at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Sara and I are getting ready to run "Writing Wikipedia Articles" for the
> second time, starting (gasp) next week. We thought it might be a good
> moment to share some of the stuff we're changing up, and how it relates to
> the SOO platform.
>
> Our major change is that we're adopting Wikipedia's "course pages<http://enwp.org/WP:Course_pages>"
> -- something we probably should have done the first time around, instead of
> reinventing the wheel! This is a system designed to support Wikipedia class
> assignments -- it's generally for university courses on any topic, but is
> of course a good fit where Wikipedia itself is the topic.
>
> The Course Pages are essentially a platform designed to handle many of the
> same things as SOO; so for us, this will mean simplifying our SOO presence,
> and guiding students to engage on Wikipedia immediately after signing up,
> so that they immediately treat Wikipedia as their main LMS platform
> throughout the class.
>
> This highlights a couple of issues (which I think I've brought up here
> before) with the SOO platform:
>
> 1. We would very much like it if we could disable Disqus, and populate
> the "Discussion" tab with our own content (basically saying, "here is where
> we discuss things on Wikipedia, and here's how to contact us by email).
> This is really important from our perspective; like many SOO topics, we
> have an issue of "a platform within a platform within a platform" which
> leads to very complex screens full of information that is not all directly
> relevant to the student, and removing extraneous discussion options will go
> a long way toward helping us create a cleaner, more comprehensible user
> experience.
> 2. No version history or archive system for SOO pages. Related to our
> desire to be able to see each other's changes to the course pages; in this
> case, we would like to be able to *archive* the 6 or 8 pages that we
> are retiring, in case we want to refer back to them, instead of *
> deleting* them. We've worked around it by pasting the markdown into a
> Google Doc, but this is a bit cumbersome.
>
> We're also wrestling with how to handle our dual nature as an ongoing
> concern, vs. a single iteration of the course (and, soon, vs. a self-paced,
> unfacilitated version). In some ways, we want to present ourselves as a
> "timeless" thing, and in other ways, as something that is "starting next
> Tuesday, and running through mid-June." There are a number of aspects to
> this: public web presence, private/coordination pages and documents,
> enrollment lists. And, how/where do we keep pages that may still be useful
> to the students who finished last month but are still wrapping up, even as
> we present fresh pages to new students?
>
> This is sort of a "work-out-loud" email -- if any of you happen to have
> suggestions about this stuff, please let us know; but mostly, we're just
> looking to keep you up to date with where we're at and how we're
> approaching things. Hopefully #1 and 2 will be addressed at some point, but
> they're not show-stoppers, obviously :)
>
> -Pete
>
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