Out Growing Blackboard and Angel Course Managers

The time has come to evolve! The Masters in Healthcare Innovation program at Arizona State University has officially become too robust and innovative for the traditional and proprietary course management system known as BlackBoard.

We are getting to a point now that we need to change too fast, the structure and limited bandwidth for uploads is hindering our ability to share ideas easily and quickly. We are now exploring utilizing free web tools to create our own, makeshift CMS system.

Although still under investigation and refinement, we are looking at FriendFeed as our central hub. Each student will create an account and share that account with the other students and faculty. For sharing up to date information on the students implementation of Innovative Leadership skills we will use Twitter. For presentation sharing, SlideShare. For group meetings and faculty office hours, Skype, and for papers Blogging.

Utilizing these tools we can begin to not only link all the assignments, courses, content, and successes together, but we can also share faster, better, and with the world.

This new direction will be under development in the coming semester starting in January. As we learn and grow this could be a new way to run courses, saving universities millions of dollars. The downside then becomes getting older faculty to adopt a new way of teaching, something that is not always easy.

We intend to share our successes and learning moments in blog form. If you have suggestions about tools that may be of use to us, please email me.

Hopefully, this will be creating a new way to conduct class and share information. Transparently.