Author Archives: Alex Chapin

About Alex Chapin

Alex Chapin no longer works at Middlebury College. He is the Executive Director of Academic Technologies at UNC Charlotte. Contact him at (704) 687-0059 or achapin@gmail.com

Course Hub

The Curricular Technology Team has proposed an alternative to Segue that has been approved for development.   Based on our analysis of existing course and curricular resources as well as findings from focus groups and surveys, we recognized that no single platform would meet the teaching, learning and research needs of all of the College and its affiliates. Thus we recommended the development of a “course hub” architecture that would enable faculty to create collections of resources for a given course in a single location referred to as a “hub.”

We recommended course hub sites be automatically created for all courses with basic course information such as the course title, description, instructor profile, schedule and location. These sites would include basic functionality for adding additional content such as a syllabus and links with an emphasis on ease of use and simplicity.

These sites would also include links to “connected” platforms allowing users to create additional resources using popular tools such as WordPress and MediaWiki that would be automatically linked back to the hub site.

Next Steps

The Curricular Technology team is now working on evaluating other platforms to connect to the course hub, focusing on learning management systems (LMS) and better tools for online discussion, collaboration, assignment submission and grading.

WordPress and Course Sites

Many faculty have started to use WordPress for course sites.  WordPress is a good choice if you just want to:

  • Share course information with your students
  • Post course announcements
  • Create hierarchically arranged pages
  • Upload files (on larger than 10 MB)
  • Start online discussion
  • Have students upload papers for peer review
  • Blog

Access to WordPress sites can be limited to students in a class (or any other Active Directory group of users). For more information on how to use WordPress for course sites, see:

WordPress @ Middlebury > Using WordPress for Course Sites

Segue from Segue: Open Sessions

The Curricular Technology team has scheduled a number of open sessions on the Segue from Segue project in Library 145.  Here are the dates and times:

  • 10:00 – 10:30, Monday August 2nd
  • 1:00 – 1:30, Tuesday, August 3th
  • 4:00 – 4:30, Wednesday, August 4th
  • 3:00 – 3:30, Thursday, August 5th

These sessions are an opportunity for you to tell us about the kinds of technologies for teaching, learning and research you think Middlebury should invest in.  We particularly encourage Language School faculty to stop by and give us feedback about your use of technology for teaching languages.

We will also discuss some of the ideas we have for alternatives to Segue including Moodle, Drupal, WordPress, Google Sites and MediaWiki.