Course Home Pages System - now live
Geoff announced the availablity of our new Course Home Pages system at the "Awayday" on Friday as planned, and yesterday (Monday) I sent the following email to all BCIM staff...------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sent by BCIM StaffWeb Emailer to all BCIM staff ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sender: Martin Bush ------------------------------------------------------------------------ This email is primarily aimed at Course Directors. Further to Geoff's announcement at the 'Awayday' on Friday, we have a new facility allowing Course Directors to create a home page for each year/cohort of their course. These home pages are meant to act as a repository for announcements and useful web links for students within the cohort. The system uses the StaffWeb Emailer to send announcements to a pre-defined email list associated with each Course Home Page. (Blackboard can be used for this purpose too, but many users have commented on its poor usability!) The new 'Course Home Pages' link within the StaffWeb home page will take you to this page: http://www.lsbu.ac.uk/php4-cgiwrap/bcim/CourseHomePages/index.php The new system is very easy to use - in my opinion, at least - and if you can spare the time I would encourage you to experiment with it. Please email me if you have any queries or would like any help with it. I would be happy to organise a training session if there is sufficient demand, although I would hope that the online instructions are fairly self-explanatory. Martin Bush. ------------------------------------------------------------------------
I've had three pieces of feedback from Course Directors so far:
from Susie... > Have been experimenting with the system and the only problem > I have is the URL length when adding a link is limited. Therefore > some URL I would like to add can not be listed.
from Aziz... "I'd like to be able to post attachments, please!"
from Dave P... > I tried, but - I need one page for both top-up courses (and both > years). When I put in the course code as "1094.1,1094.2, > 1385.1,1385.2" I get an error. Can it do this? ...to which I replied as follows: "You need to create a separate page for each cohort I'm afraid! We assumed that CDs would want to post different announcements to different cohorts. Shall I add your suggestion to the wish list for v2?!"
Note (added 10/9/07)
Hi Susie, Helen, Frances, This is just to let you know that we have withdraw the BCIM Course Home Pages system, since Blackboard now offers similar functionality. It was an experiment only, as you will recall. I will leave your pages live for the next few weeks at this URL -- http://www.lsbu.ac.uk/php4-cgiwrap/bcim/CourseHomePages/index.php -- but there is no longer a link to your Course Home Pages from either the StudentWeb or the StaffWeb. I hope that you found our system useful last year, and I apologise for any inconvenience that its withdrawal may cause you. Best wishes, Martin.