[LON-CAPA-users] Announcements, blogs, RSS feeds, etc...

[lon-capa-users@mail.lon-capa.org]

I'm looking for some creative advice here:

We have historically structured our courses with an introductory web page 
that comes up when students log into the course. It has a nice banner, 
some side links to Navigate Contents, Acroread, Physlets, etc.... We post 
sample exams, external links and some announcements.

What we don't do is keep up very well with these announcements. We're 
falling back to making NAVmaps the first page of a course. I was curious 
how people handled the issue of announcements and trying to get them 
linked into the course so the students see them easily, but perhaps 
without the urgency of critical messages.

Several options come to mind:

* We could actually create a discussion board as the first page of the 
course and post new announcements there.

* We could somehow link the calendar into the course as the first page.

With both of these solutions, the navigate contents page is one level 
removed, which is not a problem once a student has been trained, but can 
cause headaches early on.

* Has anyone considered the possibility of a course specific announcement 
space that can be inserted at the top of the NAVMAPS page, just as machine 
announcements show up at the bottom?

* Is anyone willing to give the 2 paragraph explanation of blog and RSS 
functionality. How does one access a blog once it is created? How do 
students access the course RSS feed?

Just curious - we're looking for ways to streamline and improves such 
things.

Later,
Mark

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Mark Lucas					email: lucasm@ohiou.edu
252D Clippinger Lab  				phone: (740)597-2984
Department of Physics and Astronomy             fax:   (740)593-0433
Ohio University
Athens, OH 45701