ABSTRACT
Over the last 10 years, students have become more comfortable with different
types of electronic communication, and delivery systems have proliferated: social
networking sites, blogs, and online forums have all become familiar means of
communication. Building courses programmatically means taking advantage
of that familiarity to create a uniform system of delivery that will maintain
consistency between sections, facilitate teacher training and communication, and
help us collect meaningful data for assessment. Moreover, as universities come
under increased pressure to assess student performance accurately and to offer
more online courses to meet student demand, a university-sponsored course
management system (CMS) is becoming an increasingly common course environ-
ment. Some programs have responded by developing cutting-edge tech-
nologies, incorporating a wide range of applications for both courses and
assignments. But what happens when circumstances put you well behind
the cutting edge? When you lack the resources and expertise to develop a
customized CMS, how do you take advantage of technological sophistication
from the margins?
