A collaboration between the Center for Instructional Technology (CIT) and the Office of Information Technology (OIT), the pilot for what would become Sites@Duke Express explored how WordPress could be used as a flexible publishing platform for teaching and learning. This project was part of the Duke Digital Initiative which ran from 2004 through mid-2019 and had been established to help Duke experiment with new and emerging technologies in service of teaching and learning.
Fall 2009
Goals
- Support the teaching and learning needs of 10-12 undergraduate courses for flexible web publishing.
- Gather feedback and evaluation data to enhance and update the WordPressMU platform for teaching purposes.
Development
- Set up initial WordPressMU instance
- Selected and added plugins, templates and interface options as needed by end-users
- Identified and recruited 12 Duke faculty for initial pilot and testing
- Developed training materials (blog posts, video tutorials, etc)
- Provided one on one training sessions for faculty (WordPress Office Hours program)
- Provided in-class training for students
- Provided deliverables for OIT project team – including recommendations and concerns
- Developed evaluation plan (survey of faculty and students)
Spring 2010
Goals
- Open pilot to more participants and continue to collect feedback for evaluation.
- Capture key use cases and user needs to inform future project planning.
Development
- Added plugins to track theme and plugin usage per site
- Worked with OIT partners on major upgrade (2.8 –> 2.9)
- Cleared out old/unused themes; added new themes as needed
- Created new examples and help documentation for pilot website including info on Posts and Pages, Multimedia, and Writing for the Web
- Continued drop-in, one-on-one training for faculty (Office Hours)
- Provided in-class training and small group training for students
- Collected Spring feedback via surveys and informal comments
