5365+Reflection


 * EDLD 5365**

The assignments in this course were a mixed bag. Some like the web site planning and web publishing policies were very effective. These were very beneficial. It was difficult to truly create policies in a one week period, but the experience was worthwhile. Having just gone through the process of selecting a website hosting partner, I can say that the project compared very well to the process we went through. We had a committee that included members with a variety of skills and knowledge, ranging from web 2.0 to html code and design. Our number one priority was ease of use by teachers and the end users. That experience complimented the course assignments. The website design assignments also were complimented by our work on our website. I had many discussions with our first communication specialist about our site structure and the open source CMS he used for it. This course allowed me to explore that further. The assignments strengthened my opinion about open source content management systems. These systems can be very good for a school district, if they have someone who is interested and has the time to devote to learning code and managing the system well enough to make it easy for end user content creation. It is not necessary for that person to know html, but they would be severely limited in what they could do with the site if they didn't. Managing an open source CMS or LMS takes time. That means staff resources have to be allotted to that. That is the problem with the open source solution. There are many tools that can be plugged into open source systems that can make them powerful tools. They are a viable option, but considerations must include staffing. Working with Drupal was frustrating and it illustrated the issues with using an open source CMS. One thing I haven't mentioned and didn't think about before was that often, you have to install plug ins for open source tools. This was illustrated with our assignments that were completed in the universities Drupal server. It didn't have a good WYSIWYG. It also didn't separate the users pages. Anyone who was a registered user could edit any page, whether it belonged to them or not. That is good for collaboration, but it is very bad when people are learning the system. It was exactly what could happen with a CMS that a district sets up. The district could become so busy managing the CMS that they are not able to maintain the website. The final assignment was to create a pre and post launch plan. This was also a very good activity. Overall, these course assignments gave me experiences working more closely on some processes that I had limited exposure to before. It was beneficial for me to work directly with these processes. 