#7 - Collaborative web page creation and development
- Involving students in the creation of web pages is a good way to make them feel more engaged, and to show that you value their input.
- Creating web pages is an important transferable skill - not just a technical skill, but perhaps more importantly a key aspect of communicating in the modern world.
- Web publishing systems, like the university's Sitebuilder system, make this easy to do and to manage.
Category: Teach in-class or online Enable online discussions and communications outside of class time
Enhancement goals addressed: Student as producer | Valuing student contributions | Valuing student creativity | Transferable skills | Making links to employability
Tools and how to get support: Sitebuilder
Solution overview
You can easily involve students in the creation of web pages. The Sitebuilder web content publishing tool - used for making most Warwick web sites, includes collaboration features. You can award edit permissions to any member of the university, or to a pre-existing group - such as all the members of a module. Each time a change is made, the editor can leave a comment. This could explain the change, or update other editors on what to do next.
Process
- Creating pages with Sitebuilder is quite intuitive, but a short demonstration for your new editors helps. Don't assume that everyone will immediately understand the structure of Sitebuilder based web sites, the relationship between pages and subpages, the different kinds of page, and the structure of pages. Our experience tells us that some people find this challenging.
- Consider setting the new pages as hidden from search and restricted to a small audience initially.
- When you are happy with them, you can let the search engines find the page and change the permissions to allow anyone to view them.