March 14, 2002
MyUWClass ready to serve faculty
Teachers at the UW now have an easier way to keep track of their classes, contact students, and produce course Web pages
MyUWClass, a web portal for faculty and instructors, is up and running on University servers, giving teachers a central place to manage their courses and to access the latest Web-based teaching tools.
MyUWClass gives instructors a customized set of tools and resources for each of their classes, from the class description, to lists of enrolled students. Faculty can use the portal to look up information about the equipment in their classroom or to check on their reserves with the UW libraries. They can set up e-mail lists for their students, easily post Web pages for a class, or use any of the other Web-based teaching tools from the Catalyst Toolkit.
Most of these resources were already available to faculty, but not in one place, and not always easily. What MyUWClass does is bring these services together in a personalized Web portal that doesn’t require faculty to know anything about Web design, computer programming or database management. It is also easier to maintain and to scale.
For example, teachers setting up a Web page for their class through SimpleSite, one of the Catalyst tools available through MyUWClass, only need to fill out a Web-based form. Faculty can then post the page to the Web without the need for specialized software. Once posted, the address for the Web page is published to the students enrolled in the course who see it in their MyUW course schedule.
Bill Shirey, manager of Student Information Systems with UW Computing & Communications, said his staff worked with the Educational Technology Development Group and the Office of the Registrar to assemble MyUWClass from existing computer systems and databases, avoiding the need for proprietary — and expensive — tools. A version of MyUWClass has been created for UW’s distance learning offerings, with the help of UW Educational Outreach.
“We didn’t seek an outside vendor to provide a portal for us. We just put all the people together in one room and decided how it would work” said Tom Lewis, director of the Ed-Tech Development Group.
Lewis said this approach is often the exception at universities, where traditional boundaries between schools, departments, and distance learning units keep people from sharing resources, or from using them in the most efficient way.
Faculty can access MyUWClass through the “Teaching” tab of the MyUW portal. For an example of what MyUWClass looks like, visit www.washington.edu/students/myclass/MyClass.htm. For more information on Catalyst, visit http://catalyst.washington.edu/.
