Google Groups is a free service which helps groups of people communicate using email and the Web. Every group has a home page hosted by Google where members can start their own discussions, announcement lists, and mailing lists in minutes. Google Groups makes it easier to read and participate in discussions than most commercial course management software, such as Blackboard or WebCT. All the replies to an initial post are gathered on one page. You can bookmark topics you’re interested in, and have new replies to that topic delivered to your inbox. Best of all, there are no pop-ups or banner ads displayed within Google Groups—only Google’s relatively easy to ignore text ads.

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Yahoo Groups is actually a Web-based e-mail list service that happens to offer tools for Chat, File and Database Sharing, Polls, a Calendar with reminders, and Membership management (so you can easily enroll course participants). You also get a choice of three options for monitoring group activity: 1) You may receive an email every time there is new activity in the group, 2) You may receive a summary email of activity once a day, or 3) You may opt to see your group email only when you visit the group’s site.

Best of all, Yahoo Groups is free!   Ads? Yes, a few banner ads. But, hey, no big deal. Yahoo’s ads are a bit more conspicuous than those at Google, but customers report they learn fairly quickly to just click past them.

Up next: “Google Groups and Other Google Apps.”

claude

Think of your Web site as a guest on the World Wide Web. Where will it stay? How can you make it happy? In Internet parlance, a host is someone (a private enterprise) who fills a room with computer hardware and software, connects it all to the Internet, and allows you to put your files on the hardware so other people can see them over the Internet.

Every Web site needs a host and yours is no exception. Your organization may host your site on its own server. If that’s the case, you will probably receive enough space for one course, maybe more. Your first step in finding a host should be to confirm the policy where you work.

If you plan to create sites for more than one course, or if you think your course will need more space than your own organization provides, you have the option of choosing your own host. There are several perfectly good ones that won’t cost you a dime. Check out Free Web Hosts at http://www.free-webhosts.com/. They provide a list of hosts that offer free web space along with reviews, testimonials and ratings. Buyer beware, but it may be worth a look.

Many free web hosting providers support themselves by placing ads on your web pages. But what’s a few ads, anyway?

Before you conclude that you just can’t bear advertising on your Web site, don’t be too hasty. The Web is full of ads, but that doesn’t stop your customers or students from surfing it, enjoying it, loving it. In fact, they don’t think twice about the ads. Ads are everywhere–so much so that they’ve become invisible. After a few seconds at most, people don’t even notice them, and neither will your course participants. Don’t let a few ads stop you from using a free Web hosting service to build a really simple, really inexpensive, really terrific site.

Still not convinced? Then maybe you’d better spend a little something for Web hosting. There are a number of excellent choices that won’t empty your wallet.

Spend a Little, Lose the Ads

At FutureU, we use two providers for almost all our web hosting (we run about 8 different sites at the moment). Which two? I’m glad you asked. In our estimation SiteGround.Com and GoDaddy.Com run neck-in-neck in the website hosting horse race. Each of these providers has two really important features going for it: 1) They have really good support and 2) they’re cheap.

SiteGround has a really super starter package that includes:

• A FREE Domain Name
  
• 24,000 MB Web Space
  
• 24/7 Technical Support
  
• A really easy to use administration panel (CPanel)

• An automated loader for dozens of open source software packages such as Mambo, Joomla, PHP this and that, and, of course, Moodle
• A free site building tool that makes it easy to create web pages (SiteBuilder)
• Unlimited email accounts (for you and your students)
  
• FREE Blog Installation
  
• An E-commerce package if you decide you want to sell something

And all of that is just $9.00 a month with a $20.00 setup fee. If you buy 1 year in advance, the setup fee is waived and the fee is $6.00 a month. If you commit to two years, again, no setup fee, and only $5.00 a month.

We use Siteground for BetaTestLab.Net, our open source testing lab.

Check out SiteGround by visiting www.siteground.com (Caveat: FutureU is a SiteGround affiliate, so if you decide to go with them, we’ll make a little change. So thanks in advance for that.)

GoDaddy has an even cheaper starter package, the “Economy Plan,” that offers only the most basic of features. You get 5 GB of storage space for only $4.00 a month if you buy 2 months in advance. We use GoDaddy for FutureU.Com where we have the most pages to host and that helps us save a few bucks. As with SiteGround, GoDaddy also offers a suite of open source applications you can install to beef up your functionality.

Other Good Options

Let’s start with Bizland. Originally built to support small businesses, Bizland sells hosting plans that start as low as $5.95 a month for a 200 GB, ad-free, space. That’s plenty of space for a course web site.

Hot Tip: Here’s one of the very best deals of all for Web site hosting: Fat Cow Web Hosting has a bargain-basement hosting plan for only $88 a year. That’s one whole year for less than a hundred bucks. It includes free domain registration, unlimited website space, 100 email accounts (so you can give a course-based email address to every participant), and an easy browser-based control panel. You also get a ton of features, including cart wizards for building e-commerce shopping carts where you can sell course materials directly to participants. Plus, you get help in setting up a merchant account for taking credit card payments. Fat Cow also offers phpBB or other forum software for threaded discussions, and all the usual customer support services. All this for $88 a year.

Now that’s a bargain! Not just a fat cow but fat city!

One More Low-Cost, Great Idea: Intranet Software

Like course management software, web-based Intranet software has  templates for the materials, calendar, discussions and other features of your course. You don’t have to learn much, if any, HTML either. So far, the two are pretty much the same. But Intranet software is usually a lot simpler to use than its more "comprehensive" course management cousin. Typically the communication tools are just plain better. And, most important of all to any real bargain hunter, the basic features are usually inexpensive.

What’s missing? Well, as you might guess, an Intranet has no electronic gradebook. (See the earlier post about gradebooks for a solution to that). If that’s okay with you, an Intranet software may be the way to go.

Here’s one Intranet possibility:

CommunityZero.Com is one of the best-kept secrets on the Web. For their “consumer” version, they offer a 30-day free trial and then charges only $50 a year for all of these features:

• Publishing (text, links, HTML, etc.)
• Discussion Groups
• News Feeds
• Chat
• Note Boards
• Shared Lists
• Group Calendar
• Opinion Polls
• Image Gallery
• File Sharing
• Instant Messenger
• Automated Member List
• Customizable Appearance
• Automated Invitations with Tracking

Still want more choices for Web hosting? In the next two posts, we’ll cover the two, big, advertising-supported options: Google Groups and Yahoo Groups.

Ready to put your course content into your course Web site?

Course management software provides an elaborate set of procedures for this simple process. Do you need to follow those procedures?

Certainly not.

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All you really need to keep track of student grades is a simple spreadsheet or even a table inside a word processor. That’s easy. However, most online course developers still face one nagging question: "How can I post grades to the Web and still keep them private?"

The answer is simple.

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Surveys and Polls

Sometimes a quiz is overkill. Sometimes all you need is a quick answer from all the participants in your course about a burning
issue or a logistical question.

Field trip on Tuesday? Or Thursday? Got a
handle on the imperfect subjunctive, or do you want one more lesson before the test? Can you view a video on your computer?

Want the answer right away? Use an online poll. Want a polling option that’s both free and easy to use?

Here are several:

FreePolls.Com
offers a free, easy polling platform.

Perseus Software offers a free, easy one-question poll that’s especially fast and can either be linked to or embedded in a web page.

PollCode.Com’s one-question poll tool is even easier to use and can also be embedded in a Web page. PollCode.Com polls include ads, but for $2.00 per poll, you can make your polls ad free.

A more powerful polling tool, but still free, is available from PollDaddy.Com. For $200.00 a year, PollDaddy.Com offers a “Pro” version that includes “Vote Analysis” (Pro account users can see extra reports for their polls such as individual vote report, voter location, and can also detect and remove fraudulent multiple votes from the same IP.).

Well, that’s it for today.

Claude

Next up: “Solving the Gradebook Dilemma.”

Tests! Gotta love ‘em. They tell you whether your excellent teaching has actually made a dent. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to offer tests, quizzes, drills, surveys, and polls as a part of your course Web site?

You could learn enough Web programming skills to build them yourself, but there are so many good products that do it for you and that are free or cheap, why not use one of them?

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If you want to use someone else’s ideas on your course Web site, try summarizing them rather than copying them outright.

Strict laws apply to the duplication of other people’s intellectual property, even on the Internet.

For more on copyright and fair use, check out any of these resources:

• Intellectual Property, Copyright, and Fair Use Resources
• Fair Use of Copyrighted Works
• Copyright and Fair Use (Stanford University)
• Educators, Technology, and the Law
• Instructional Resources on the Web:  Copyright

Also, Gail and I have written a guide to Copyright and Public Domain that is available free when you purchase either our Student Web Book or Faculty Web Book.

claude

The content of an online course is like a book. Maybe a book with pictures, but a book nonetheless. Words, sentences, paragraphs, pages of text.

On your course Web site you might want to display:

• Lectures
• Lecture Notes
• Readings
• Assignments
• Case Studies

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Great! So now you’ve got your course syllabus. Now, how about a simple calendar where you list all the milestones and due dates for your course? If all you want is a list of events, you can make your calendar with any of the HTML editors we’ve already mentioned, but if you prefer a month-at-a-glance version that really looks like a calendar, we have just what you need.

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