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Like many of my colleagues, I knew little about how to create my own web content until the advent of the Online Syllabus Initiative last summer. However, it didn’t take me long to advance from posting an online syllabus to creating a whole website. I now have websites for all of my courses. Some are more elaborate than others. The first real website I created was inspired by an assignment I created for my English 100 students last semester. The final project was an Online Self Portrait. The ultimate goal was for each student to create a network of texts (academic, professional, and personal) that represented the student and his/her membership in various “discourse communities” (different social, cultural, and vocational groups that have unique elements of speech/writing).

It only took a week or so in the computer lab to get even the least experienced students up and running with an OX account and the shell of webpage. FrontPage is really pretty easy to use. If you know how to use Word, it’s not all that much of a leap to learn FrontPage.

A nice byproduct of the assignment was that students got to learn a lot about their classmates (shared interests, academic and otherwise); in fact, many told me they wished we’d done this earlier in the semester—something I’ll consider next time around.

One of the keys to effective writing is a keen awareness of purpose and audience. The majority of students seemed to take the project quite seriously, and part of this had to do, I think, with the fact that they knew they were creating and publishing a public document. This was not simply a paper that only the professor would be viewing and grading. This was something that anyone might view: professors, administrators, students, parents, and perhaps even potential employers.

One of the keys to effective teaching is the ability to motivate students. So far, I have been pleased with the level of student interest and effort that web-enhanced projects have elicited. (I have designed web-content and web-projects for an upper-level humanities course as well, with equally positive results).