A Blog

Purdue University is all about being #1 and ahead of the curve in terms of technology. That’s probably why we bought our online course software from a company that sells software to every other university system out there. This software was so bad, they had to change it’s name to get past the bad reputation it had gained.

Anyways, a function of this software is to allow professors and teaching assistants to send announcements and mail to students. That’s a fairly great feature, except that it really is not email. (The university has a great system in place so courses have mailing lists that automatically includes every student registered). As well, blackboard by default does not in any way notify students that they have pending messages or announcements from teachers unless they happen to log in and see the magic green box indicating something new.

Of course, this default setting is fairly ridiculous as checking yet another web site is not as fun and exciting as it would sound. The solution is to log into the blackboard and on the home page there is a “My Settings” link. If one ventures there and clicks on the “My Tool Options” tab, there are many good settings to play with. The best one of all, and the one that makes the blackboard mail system tolerable, is under “Mail” and then “Mail Forwarding”. So far, it appears that the messages it sends are just notifications about there being mail available… But, at least some notification is better than missing a note and showing up to an early morning class when it was cancelled the night before.

The methods I’ve had teachers use to distribute things:

• Chalk/Dry Erase Boards
• Sticky notes on doors
• Web pages
• News Groups
• Department Mailing Lists
• University Mailing Lists
• Mails with everyone in the To: field
• FTP
• Blackboard
• Cell phone calling trees

I can not wait until some CS prof revives gopher to distribute class files into Fax messages that get handled over a VoIP and that eventually calls my cell phone.