Teachers at the 91探花now have an easier way to keep track of their classes, contact students, and produce course Web pages
MyUWClass, a web portal for faculty and instructors, is up and running on University servers, giving teachers a central place to manage their courses and to access the latest Web-based teaching tools.
MyUWClass gives instructors a customized set of tools and resources for each of their classes, from the class description, to lists of enrolled students. Faculty can use the portal to look up information about the equipment in their classroom or to check on their reserves with the 91探花libraries. They can set up e-mail lists for their students, easily post Web pages for a class, or use any of the other Web-based teaching tools from the Catalyst Toolkit.
Most of these resources were already available to faculty, but not in one place, and not always easily. What MyUWClass does is bring these services together in a personalized Web portal that doesn鈥檛 require faculty to know anything about Web design, computer programming or database management. It is also easier to maintain and to scale.
For example, teachers setting up a Web page for their class through SimpleSite, one of the Catalyst tools available through MyUWClass, only need to fill out a Web-based form. Faculty can then post the page to the Web without the need for specialized software. Once posted, the address for the Web page is published to the students enrolled in the course who see it in their My 91探花course schedule.
Bill Shirey, manager of Student Information Systems with 91探花Computing & Communications, said his staff worked with the Educational Technology Development Group and the Office of the Registrar to assemble MyUWClass from existing computer systems and databases, avoiding the need for proprietary 鈥� and expensive 鈥� tools. A version of MyUWClass has been created for UW鈥檚 distance learning offerings, with the help of 91探花Educational Outreach.
鈥淲e didn鈥檛 seek an outside vendor to provide a portal for us. We just put all the people together in one room and decided how it would work鈥� said Tom Lewis, director of the Ed-Tech Development Group.
Lewis said this approach is often the exception at universities, where traditional boundaries between schools, departments, and distance learning units keep people from sharing resources, or from using them in the most efficient way.
Faculty can access MyUWClass through the 鈥淭eaching鈥� tab of the My 91探花portal. For an example of what MyUWClass looks like, visit . For more information on Catalyst, visit