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February 27, 2006
Brian Mackie: Class Management and Teaching Collaboration
Brian Mackie teaches database and data communications classes at NIU. He's developed a class management system that competes with Blackboard. But, Brian's system has features and functions that Blackboard does not, and it's open source. He showed me the system and even created an example class for me to teach. Faculty all over the business school are using the system -- if you're looking for class management software, I'd definitely contact Brian. His email address: m10bxm1@wpo.cso.niu.edu.
Brian has been giving his students a project of writing a online textbook. Students choose a topic, code it in html (either from scratch or using the editor of their choice) and submit it to a class site for inclusion in the book. Students are required to critique each other's submissions, and the author of the submission is required to respond to the critiques. You can find the results of one such project at http://omis5.omis.niu.edu/omis649book1/.
Check it out! Seems like an incredibly effective way of teaching collaborative work!
Posted by DavidK at February 27, 2006 05:16 PM | Permalink