I worked with Professor Pyle in the Economics Department to create a platform with all the links to videos used in his courses so that his students can easily access them. With many videos used in several of his classes, he wanted a single repository for all the links to the videos to make sharing them with his classes easier. We decided to create a WordPress site that organizes the different videos into different courses.
It is a simple website where the links to the videos are organized by different courses. Despite the simple layout, I tried to make the site more aesthetically pleasing by adding a skyline of Beijing as a header image. The photograph was searched using Creative Commons, by ahenobarbus (Flickr) [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:View_of_Beijing.jpg).
Currently, the website is open to everyone with a Middlebury account, thus Middlebury students who has a link to the website can potentially view the videos for all the courses. For some videos, those shared on Panopto, this could be problematic, thus in order to abide with the copyright laws, Professor Pyle would have to manage the share settings on Panopto every semester to control who gets to view the videos.
The whole project took around a month. After creating a draft website, I met with Professor Pyle to receive feedback and further discuss the details of the website (eg. the title of the website, aesthetics, etc.), which helped me better understand which direction to move forward in terms of the project. I changed the theme of the website to make it more interesting and added a header image to keep it more aesthetically pleasing. Despite the slight changes in design, I decided to keep the website as simple and minimalist as possible, so that it’s easy to navigate and practical for both Professor Pyle and the students. I’ve also shared with Professor Pyle a document outlining the different instructions on editing the site and troubleshooting methods.
