Blogs square-up against Sakai

There’s a new kid on the block, and he’s looking to brawl with the ring’s reigning champ, Sakai.

For students new to online classes, a novel concept to some erstwhile high schoolers, Sakai is Chadron State’s online portal for web-based and distance-learning courses. Also called CSC Online, this service allows students to access the pages for all their classes and find notes, homework, and tests professors post.

With the simple entry of ID and password, students can enjoy the realization that they forgot to take a test before its time limit, or that the slides from the presentation they missed aren’t available. They can slowly become near-sighted, as they squint to see the micro-fonts of their peer’s forum posts, and they can fruitlessly email their absent adjunct, desperate for the never-coming response.

This summer I enrolled in a online course, ENG 431/531 Topics in English: The Graphic Novel in the ELA Classroom, but when I logged into Sakai, I found no page. My professor, Elisabeth Ellington, had opted for a blog-based class, where students would post a “response” to each novel they read, culminating in a final project in four weeks.

I’d never seen a challenger to Sakai before, and this rookie stepped into the ring with lots of promise. In this corner, weighing 3.76 kilobytes, the reigning champ, Sakai. Opposing him, weighing 15.97 kilobytes, the spunky competitor, WordPress blog-class. Let’s get ready to rumble!

EASY TO USE:

Although the blog-class, based in the WordPress free blog-maker, might be startling and new, there are plenty of online tutorials available. WordPress is a global structure with thousands of users, and plenty have made youtube videos for the newbie’s benefit. I remember my first freshman exploration of Sakai, the navigation confused me, and each professor used it differently. Sakai does boast a 24/7 help hotline, but it’s like a man with a cane: he’s glad it’s there, but would rather he didn’t need it at all.

TECHNICAL ISSUES:

I have just spent the last 15 minutes sculpting the perfect Sakai forum post. It’s concise, deep, and is sure to blow away my half-paragraph peers. I turn away to pour myself a congratulatory root-beer, and Sakai times out! My hard work disappears in a puff of log-in screen.

Next time I’m wiser, I write everything in Word, then copy and paste. The text appears in a jumble of HTML, or with letters missing. The blog-class never had these issues, and the format allowed for more creativity, with pictures, links, videos, and a just plan attractive look.

PUBLIC:

This is a double-edged sword for the blog-class. Everything you post is on the internet. It’s public. Someone can Google the novel you responded to, find your post, comment on it, plagiarize it, make fun of you for it, whatever.

The public aspect is good, because it builds your online presence (an important aspect in the modern work-force). It forces the participants to take their work seriously, as future employers may see it.

Your classmates can also see it. They can post praise or make you feel inferior with their superior additions. This is like a Sakai forum, but it encompasses all work.

Our final projects were posted publicly. I actually liked this feature, as it challenged me to meet or exceed my classmates’ work. I usually don’t benefit from forced-response forum replies, or even from the presence of my peers in online classes. The blog-class made it a cumulative effort. We all maintained the blog together.

PERMANENCE:

A blog post, once posted, is kept. The work does not expire with the class time-frame, like a Sakai course. Your work is preserved for the posterity of generations, or your own personal use. Let’s say you wanted to reuse a particularly snappy Oscar Wilde quote, or revamp an insight you had about Kafka. Your original material is still there, unlike a Sakai forum or assignment which has long-since perished.

The negative side of public, online format classes is that tests, quizzes, or basic question-answer homework assignments are a challenge to create. Such is not the stuff of blogs. But a teacher who opts for the creative, open-format of a blog class probably doesn’t put too much weight on the educational value of those anyway.

So the rookie contender won my heart. I agreed with Ellington’s support of the blog-class when she said, “all the features you’d normally access in Sakai—Assignments, Lessons, Discussion Forums, Announcements—will be found in one central location on our course blog.”

Admittedly, the blog-class is not for all curriculums. But blogging could be a powerful, connective tool in any class, if done right.

Blog-classes are already sparring with Sakai for Liberal Arts and Humanities courses, and if professors found a creative alternative for those areas, I’m confident the internet has more surprising tools to re-think online classes, for the benefit of students and teachers.

Sakai might need to throw in the towel.