Teaching with Wordpress MU
I start my first class tomorrow: LIS753 Internet Fundamentals & Design.
We’re hosting all of our courses at http://classes.tametheweb.com/, via a WordpressMU installation. After considering and playing with Drupal, I was drawn back to Wordpress and its ease of use and multiple blog possibilities. Watching the excellent WP-based work of Casey Bisson and Alan Levine helped me make my decision to stay with WP. My ultra-cool grad assistant Kyle Jones worked on making the classes site functional and pleasing to the eye. Thanks Kyle!
We’re sticking with Wordpress now and hope to add the officially released version of Buddypress in the winter to further extend the community around these courses.
Please take a look at the courses and let me know what you think.
I’m excited to begin my third year of teaching. 
September 5th, 2008 at 10:39 pm
Thanks for sharing this – interesting to see how you structured all this. Thinking about using Wordpress MU for a project, this helps. And wow, the classes look just terrific. What fun! Wish I could go back to grad school again.
September 7th, 2008 at 9:40 pm
Michael, this is a great idea. I’ve been using an ‘out-of-the-box’ WordPress MU blog for the course I teach on electronic publishing;I like the way you’ve customised it for your site. Can anyone join, or are you restricting it to students only? Mine is hosted on the vuw.ac.nz domain, which means I’ve had to restrict registration and moderate comments, which does create a barrier. But it’s still better than using Blackboard!
September 9th, 2008 at 11:25 am
[...] Michael Stephens is now using WordPress MU to host his classes online, and that opening page is really sweet. It’s hardly the first time somebody’s used a blog to host course content, but I like where he’s going with it. We’re significantly expanding our use of WordPress at Plymouth, and using it to replace WebCT/Blackboard is definitely an option. The biggest difference may be that course content in blogs is public, by default, but content in Blackboard is shared only with the members of the course. John Martin calls this “teaching out loud.” My opinion is a little more emphatic: “don’t do it in the dark.” [...]
September 9th, 2008 at 12:30 pm
It really is a great system!
September 23rd, 2008 at 2:02 am
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January 24th, 2009 at 10:57 pm
Good piece.
January 30th, 2009 at 9:28 am
Thanks for sharing this – interesting to see how you structured all this. Thinking about using Wordpress MU for a project, this helps. And wow, the classes look just terrific. What fun! Wish I could go back to grad school again.
September 3rd, 2009 at 6:46 pm
Drupal features are nice, too, but I think you made the right choice with Wordpress MU.
October 28th, 2009 at 5:35 pm
[...] note to self: add wordpress to the to learn list… http://tametheweb.com/2008/09/05/teaching-with-wordpress-mu/ [...]
November 20th, 2009 at 5:01 am
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