Delivering WOST J111 on the Web

Clearly many forms of technology today are available to assist us in creating a participatory web-based distance education classroom.  Many of the readers of Kairos use MOOs and MUDs, have students contribute to listservs and forums, and teach students about searching on the internet and evaluating the information we find there.  Teachers are using Connect, Daedelus, Blackboard, WebCT, and many other platforms to create fully online courses or to supplement brick and mortar courses.

To teach WOST J111, I decided to use Blackboard, which the University of South Carolina had just adopted University-wide.  The primary advantages of this software for my class were that it was free to all my students, and that it wouldn't require installation or any other software than a browser (I had been using Connect.Net, which the user must download from the internet and install with a compatible version of Microsoft Word).  The staff at Distance Education and Support encouraged me furthermore to adopt the program so that I could rely on the University's support resources, rather than put myself in the position of being the sole source of support to my students.  While I had not taught with Blackboard before, I had previewed the program before and had seen it demonstrated, and I believed then (and still do) that the program is relatively simple to use.  I also hoped that gaining familiarity with the program would be a benefit to the students enrolling from the regional campuses in the USC system.  I knew they were very likely to be asked to use Blackboard in one of their classes after they changed campuses to Columbia to complete their four-year degrees, and I hoped that having worked with the program before would give them an edge.

Blackboard also made available most of the functions of the internet that I wanted in my class, in addition to many other features I never used at all.  The program provides a method for electronic paper exchange between students and faculty, with the option of individual or group paper exchange.  Blackboard includes a secure chat board and discussion forum space as well, available only to registered participants in the course, and this was, I felt, particularly important given that students in a Women's Studies course might be engaged at various times in academic discussions about wage discrimination or more personal discussions of their experiences with sexuality.  The program also provides for group interactions; the instructor can choose to provide access for groups to a group listserv, a file-exchange area, and a discussion board and a chat area for only the members of the group.

Essentially, when I developed the course, I envisioned students working in a combination of ways, reading traditional academic essays from a women’s studies textbook, and posting comments to a discussion board about their readings from those texts.  In addition, though, I culled content for the course from the internet and from the libraries (both physical and virtual).  I required students to research gender and race in electronic library databases, in popular magazines, both printed and online, and on the internet in general.  Students created online group presentations in which they linked to sites of interest to study and analyze representations of gender.  Finding presentation content on the web provided an ideal way for the class to share a common body of reading more diverse than could be found in a traditional textbook.  This, I think, is among the most basic of online course designs, not at all revolutionary to the audience here, but quite a new thing on my campus and at many other small campuses throughout the country, and to all of the 29 students who experimented with online education for the first time in WOST J111.  While the work appeared to engage the students, the structure of the course and the technology I'd chosen became rather more important than I had expected.