There are a few reasons you may be conducting some or all of your course in a space outside of the confines of Blackboard. For example:

• you want your materials to have a more modern look and feel,
• to allow students freedom to create and share more easily,
• encourage rich multimedia discussions,
• be able to better integrate current events, or
• highlight your course for the department to attract more students.

Teach in the open

If you have chosen to teach in the open, there are many tools you can use but one that UAF CTL supports is WordPress. If you have a course site on Community@UAF– our local WordPress server–you may have noticed a few changes to the main site: community.uaf.edu. It has been simplified to focus on the main groups using community: students and faculty.

Get a jumpstart on using Community

The student section goes over how to do basic tasks–make a new blog post or insert media elements. It covers how to log in and where to go for help with basic problems. If you have students participating in your community course, link to this how-to page from your site and skip the extra work of creating new directions for common tasks.

The faculty section covers the same information in the student area and topics like using the admin dashboard to setup your site, manage users, etc.

Explore open courses

The faculty section links to UAF CTL’s CTL page so you can explore open courses and view the Faculty Development Calendar ctl.uaf.edu/events/ for listings of Open Lab times. It’s easy to get help with your WordPress Community@UAF site.

Learn more about WordPress and Community@UAF

Join us at 3:30 pm on Wednesday, April 26 at CTL, 131 Bunnell Building, for the iTeach+: Tool Exploration series featuring WordPress.