OnCourse offers new look, improved student-teacher interaction

OnCourse, IU’s primary website for teacher-student interaction, underwent several changes this summer.

With the thousands of students accessing OnCourse daily, the website needed to become more user-friendly and customizable, said John Gosney, faculty liaison for learning technologies in University Information Technology Services.

The layout and functions started their modifications first, followed by the homepage.

Multiple programs have been updated to the latest versions. There have also been new preference functions added in order to make customizing easier.

“It’s a great platform to promote all things related to teaching and learning,” Gosney said.

OnCourse now includes a drag-and-drop function and a presentations function that allows presentations to be added to different OnCourse sites.

A collapsible menu bar, expandable ZIP files and a usage tool that is able to track a student’s information access frequency has also been added.

The messages function has undergone moderate modifications. Now, students can specifically choose recipients that are not allowed to see certain messages, preview messages before they are sent and configure what permissions are allowed in each message.

The main goal of the website’s changes is to increase interaction between students and their professors.

iRubric has been updated in order to provide one-to-one contact between students and their professors. Instructors will now be able to give direct feedback on assignments for each individual student.

Social media-like interaction has also influenced the OnCourse upgrade. The portal function now allows classmates to communicate directly with one another.

“It provides a Facebook-like interaction so students can connect with their classmates,” said Megan May, manager of the learning management systems.

It’s not the number of hits that’s important, May said. It’s the ability for each user to be able to use OnCourse as they see fit.

“We really want people to do the learning and teaching they need to do in an easy manner,” May said, “We want to add value to the learning process.”

Constant feedback from users help further OnCourse’s improvement, Gosney said.

“Everybody’s going to be hitting the site, so we’re interested to see how they like it,” Gosney said

The software framework of OnCourse is a universal software, used by many other colleges nationwide. This software coding is developed by multiple organizations, then made to fit each university’s needs.

“The great benefit of having a collaboratively developed code is that the core is the same,” Gosney said.

Earlier in the year, IU faculty, staff and students pitched their ideas about OnCourse’s improvements to the OnCourse Priorities Committee.

This committee, made up of IU faculty members, then decided which ideas were timely, practical and doable. Their main goal is to keep OnCourse a strategic website that meets the needs of the IU community.

“It’s all about what we want to implement at IU,” Gosney said, “If the community wants more functionality, it will happen. As the community develops, so does OnCourse.”