[ Warning, babbling below. ]

I’ve been in higher education information technology for nearly 7 years now (4+ as a full time knowledge worker,) and I’m continually surprised how many courses create their own courseware. By courseware I mean some sort of technology (interactive website, some form of e-homework submission/grading/reporting system) that helps the workflow of the course.

Campus has always provided some sort of courseware to classes — Webboard, Cyberprof, Mallard, Gradebook, WebCT, that chemistry thing, NovaNet, newsgroups, webpages, and more. In CS, we’ve provided templates for webpages to try to make things easier. We’ve developed elaborate homework handin and grader solutions (several times over, in fact.)

Since one of my work roles is the newsgroup admin, at the start of each semester I subscribe to all the course newsgroups on our server. These get too busy as the semester progresses, usually with conversations not interesting/relevant to me, but I like to lurk in the start of the semester to see what questions people have, what tools/introductions people are getting, and the always entertaining, ever-present “No one else cares so I must bitch on the Internet,” common threads.

Tonight, I found this. A TA, I presume, has decided to write more courseware stuff. It caught my eye because it’s courseware on a personal domain, and it wasn’t fully defined what it is.

I’m always surprised how much work some course staff (by that I mean TAs, but I presume they do that at the behest of their professors,) put into reinventing courseware. Even if it defines the workflow for the course, I consider that kind of work certainly tangential work to running the class. You’d think time would be better spent developing the lessons or assignments or putting direct interaction with students. Not that I’m saying courseware is easy, and Compass and such certainly have their downsides, but so don’t all the web graders, phpbbs, and other globs of use-once-then-throw-away TA-written courseware? My point is if you’re going to teach, teach. You shouldn’t, and shouldn’t have to, spend your time writing courseware. I mean, if I was a teacher, I would want to use the best tools/framework/environment possible — but I wouldn’t want to design them, I would just want to use them and use them well.

If you want to design courseware, get a job in educational IT or (probably better pay,) work for some of the large institutional courseware people. (Or FLOSS it and live off the alms of others.)

Aren’t students better served by a mainstream system that meets 80% of needs, than so many individual systems that are all singular good points and never seem to mature (ie: extinct the next semester)? Or maybe we need one massive, open source, openly developed and extendible, pluggable, skinable, flexible course solution for the enterprise education market? Have a common framework that different modules can share and extend information. Those aspiring tinkerers and developers can find supportable ways to extend the functionality they want into an already supported base? (One of the reasons I ditched my home-rolled blog for Wordpress.)

I love my job, and I’m smart enough to know there’s no panacea for everyone’s technology needs. There are just too many different options, some conflicting and some combinations still waiting to be explored… But there’s also a tremendous amount of duplication when it comes to educational IT at UIUC. It should be better, somehow.

[ Upon review/rereading this before pushing the scary "Publish" button, I realized I'm paradoxically playing both sides of a pet peeve of mine. It's the old "I don't tell you how to do your job, don't tell me how to do mine" bit. I understand the hobbiest factor of creating information tools. Hell, I do that myself. And I don't know why I take homebrew developed courseware as an attack against the infrastructure I've helped develop/create/apply/administers/maintain/occasionally swear and kick at, but I do. If I taught, I would ask to find out what the best tools were available for me, and use them. Or maybe I wouldn't use them, but I don't think I would go and design new tools... I would teach. That's what I'm there for. Later, when I'm done teaching, as a hobby or a job, I could develop the tools. I just think you can't be a servant of both of those houses, so focus on the one you're there to do.

That, if you were playing along at home, is where I tell people how to do their job because they tried to find a better way to do their job that starts to mimic how I do my job. I hate that. ]