OIT Aca­d­e­mic Ser­vices will set up a Word­Press blog for a course at the request of the instruc­tor. How­ever, the self-service inter­ac­tive tools built into Black­board 9.x might be, in some cases, a more desir­able option for course blogs.

The Black­board learn­ing man­age­ment sys­tem pro­vides tools for cre­at­ing jour­nals or blogs. Jour­nals, accord­ing to Black­board, are “per­sonal writ­ing spaces for self-reflection or per­sonal com­mu­ni­ca­tion with the instruc­tor.” A blog is a “com­men­tary avail­able for class review and com­ment.” Each has dif­fer­ent options for indi­vid­ual and group author­ship and also options for shar­ing posts with the entire class or just the instructor.

The first key dif­fer­ence between the plat­forms is pri­vacy. Access to Black­board blog con­tent is restricted to instruc­tors and stu­dents enrolled in a course. Black­board, Inc., con­sid­ers that open­ing stu­dent course work to the out­side world might vio­late pri­vacy laws, and they choose to make Black­board a closed sys­tem. While it is pos­si­ble to restrict access for Word­Press blog con­tent to a members-only group, the Word­Press plat­form is geared toward pub­lish­ing con­tent for a wider audience.

The sec­ond key dif­fer­ence is that Black­board blogs and jour­nals are sub­sec­tions of the Black­board course site. They have direct Grade Cen­ter inte­gra­tion, and they lever­age the Registrar’s enroll­ment data for access control. WordPress blogs have no direct inte­gra­tion with Black­board or enroll­ment data. An instruc­tor could just cre­ate a click­able link to an exter­nal Word­Press site within a Black­board course site; how­ever, each enrolled stu­dent must man­u­ally be added as an author of the Word­Press site.

OIT’s Black­board FAQ page has more details about Black­board blogs and Black­board jour­nals.

Posted in: How do I get a blog?