What is This?

This is for public-facing course materials of all kinds — promotion, sharing, documentation.

This service will provide templates to build sites quickly and provide targeted support, while still allowing faculty the freedom to customize and expand their sites as they choose.

This is not a replacement for our learning management system — Sakai — which is a powerful and private environment that all students have direct access to. These sites are meant to augment your main Sakai course site with a public presence, and provide resources that don’t work as well inside that more restricted and structured environment.

We’re using WordPress to build this, which doesn’t necessarily tell you that much, since lots of services use it as a base to build upon, and we have expanded it in various ways. What it does tell you is the major elements for editing and customizing your site are the same as the most widely used website builder, so there’s a wide array of options with extensive documentation and assistance available.

Examples

Digital Photography, Fall 2020 — Lisa Auerbach made Pomona’s first course “splash page” with an introductory video made in VidGrid

Out of the Cave: Philosophy of Education, Ancient and Modern — Jody Valentine posted course updates in blog format, and aggregated independent student websites, all created at the external wordpress.com service.

Contemporary Experimental Physics — for this course focused on advanced laboratory techniques, Gordy Stecklein and Richard J. Mawhorter had students create their own sites as digital posters, linked through the main site.

Latin American History Projects  — April Mayes posts student presentations and KnightLab Timelines for her Latin American history courses.

Visual Landscapes— This class was a collaboration between visiting Pomona faculty Livi Yoshioka-Maxwell and a CalState LA class taught by. Given the need for cross-institutional access, students created photo essays in Instagram accounts, with the posts embedded in a central site WordPress.com.


We’re always looking for interesting examples of public-facing course sites, and are working on demonstration sites to be used as a starter kit for Pomona courses. If you have any ideas or suggestions, please give us feedback