Models for teaching with WordPress - WordPress Tutorial

- Now let's talk about some Models for Teaching and Learning with WordPress. To begin, let's first talk about the relationship between WordPress and your Learning Management System. As you build your course, there's two primary types of content you're going to have. Content, that's okay for it to be open and available to the outside world and content that you need to keep secured and locked away and not available publicly out on the internet. The relationship is the setup by your Class Site. Now we can use WordPress to be able to create our Class Site and we can also use WordPress to house our Open Content but we can also use our Learning Management System to manage all of the Secured Content. That way from one site, students are able to access both types of content. In order to get to the Secured Content, they just need to be able to log in to your Learning Management System. Throughout of this title, let's keep this concept in mind that anytime we're referring to our Class Site, it's a site that's managed on WordPress but it has links to both of these types of content in these two different systems. Now let's get some models for teaching and learning with WordPress. And the first one I'd like to talk about is the Content Distribution Model. In this model, the Class Site is created and managed by the instructor. The students are consumers of the content that's delivered through the Class Site. The next model we'd look at is the Collaboration Model. Here, once again, we have our Class Site that's created and managed by the instructor. Students are able to consume the content that's produced on that Class Site. But the students also have authoring accounts on the Class Site so they're able to contribute content out to the main class. The next model would be the Student Ownership Model and this is a big paradigm shift because now, the students are creating and managing their own sites. They own a content that they're producing and that content is hosted on a site such as a wordpress.com site, your local camp is WordPress installation or they may have their own sub domain or their own full domain on the internet. The Class Site is still created and managed by the instructor but it becomes a central hub for all of the content that's created by the students and it is syndicated into the main site. Now before the syndication can take place, there's a step that needs to be taken and that is a Request for Permission to Syndicate because the Class Site is open and available on the public internet. The instructor needs to make a request to the student to acknowledge that, "Hey, this is your content "and we're going to syndicate it on to this main site." The students can then choose how they want to agree to that syndication. They can say, "Sure, go ahead and syndicate "all of my content on to the site." Or, the students can decide that they want to restrict some of the content by simply password protecting that content and then they give the key to that password to the instructor so the instructor is able to access the content that the student creates as part of the course but the instructor is not able to share out the intellectual property of the student. With this model then, all of the students are able to consume all of the content that's been created by all of the other members of the course. The next model we'll look at would be the Open Connected Course Model. Here, we take the idea of the students owning their own site and we expand it out so that the instructors are also creating and managing their own sites and open participants out on the internet are participating with the course by managing their own sites and all of that content can be syndicated into the Class Site which, once again, becomes a central hub of activity for the course. We also need to have this Request for Permission to Syndicate that's sent out from the Class Site out to all of the individual owners of their site to make sure that everyone agrees to have their content syndicated together. Once that agreement is made, the content produced by the satellite site can then be syndicated into the main site and everybody is able to learn and grow together. This model is the one that we're going to use for building our course in the rest of this title. Now there is one more model that I want to talk about and that's the Student Centered Model. In this model, we once again change the paradigm. Now, the Class Site is no longer the central hub. Classes, instructor sites, and other sites out on the internet becomes satellite site to the students site. So from the student's perspective, their site becomes the central hub of their educational experience. They need to still make request out to all of their instructors, to their classes, and to other people that they're going to syndicate content from. And likewise, those request may become in the other directions as well. So if an instructor or a class is going to syndicate a student's content, that request still needs to be made. Once all of that has been agreed upon, then students are able to consume content from all of those other sites. And as the students produce their own content, that content can then be re-syndicated back out to all of these different locations. This is a direction that I think education is moving towards in the future and WordPress is a great platform to begin having this conversation. So for the rest of this title, if you're following along as an instructor, the whole course is created so that you can create any of the different models of courses that we've talked about. If you're a student watching this course, you can actually build your course in the Students Centered Model. Just realize that every time we're talking about the Class Site from the instructor's perspective, if you think of the site as your own site from your own perspective, then everything should work out for you. Just be sure to get permission from any site owner that you're going to syndicate content from before you syndicate it.