Build a course site

There is a rather intensive discussion going on about how web-based courses best should be delivered. This discussion is both technical and pedagogical. Since my profession is that of teaching informatics, I have written SiteLite partly as a tool for my own work in this area.

SiteLite has no explicit tools for student- or course administration and has no ambitions to compete with the heavier tools which are made specially for this purpose. It is however fairly easy to make course sites which are easy to maintain.

Below is a procedure for integrating students home pages for a course into the course site. In my opinion this is important. The pedagogical arguments for this is beyond the scope of this text.

What I do to achieve this is as follows:

I design and build a noframe site with all relevant material. Assignments, timetables, a page for participants, a page for news, links, relevant theoretical and practical information, and what ever information is relevant.
I include a page which is an outline of a students home page with the amount of predefined structure I find proper according to the course's goals and planned work. I let SiteLite build the site with this page included in the script
I mask the home page, and its block(s), out of the script and rebuild the course site.
I edit the home page by hand, or by some clever replace. All links are made absolute to the address where the course site is finally stored. I can also take away some or most of the entries in tables of contents if I want to.
I zip down the home page together with the necessary graphics and store it on the server.
I include in a page on the course site a download option for this home page, as part of the procedure for entering the course.
Students who want to follow the course downloads the zipped home page, unzips it and sends me a mail with their name, email address and the URL of their downloaded home page.
I include this information, specially the URL, in a page with the list of all participants.

Thus the student can enter the course via her own home page for the course and can make all her work easily available for the other participants. The navigation within the course site is seamless and the home page is integrated in the course site.

The student may do whatever editing she wants on her home page. It is part of the course description what I as a teacher expect to find there in terms of completed assignments or whatever. You will find an example of this mechanism in the site: Grafisk databehandling, see the page Som Student. ( the site is in Norwegian)

It is easy to see that many of the operations above may be automated. A future version of SiteLite may include a partly automated version of this scheme. If you have any ideas, I would like to hear about them.