IDEA Studio's Open Websites Makes Creating Web Sites Easy - April 9th, 2009

Web sites are an essential way to reach a wide audience. Basic information, timely updates, visuals and other digital assets, as well as links to related materials, can all be presented to inform or persuade others. In the College of Education, students and faculty use Web sites to disseminate information about projects, research, or special group activities.

But the design, development, and posting of Web sites can be a stumbling block, requiring skills and expertise that many don’t have. The IDEA Studio has dealt with this issue for many years. It could take up to three hours to train students to use traditional Web development software, and they would often continue to need a lot of support after training.

To tackle this problem, the IDEA Studio developed “Open Websites,” a Web application that makes Web sites easy to create and maintain. It was configured on the Drupal content management system by Graduate Research Assistant Royce Kimmons, a PhD student in Instructional Technology. Open Websites, which debuted in March, can be found at ows.edb.utexas.edu.

Students can learn how to use Open Websites in about 30 minutes. A variety of preconfigured graphic themes and automatically generated menus help make it easy yet flexible to use. But the application is also powerful enough to let more advanced users create interactive animated elements with JavaScript. Users can create any number of sites, and each site can have multiple contributors.

The sites created through Open Websites must have a faculty sponsor who submits approval for the site and decides how long the site should remain posted. Instructors also have the option to create a page that lists the links to all their students’ sites, making it easy for students to checkout their classmates’ work. All sites are hosted on the College Web server.

Five College of Education instructors have begun to use Open Websites. Those working on research projects with student teams are particularly interested in the application, because it easily provides a Web presence for the project and allows students to post résumés and communicate with one another. Another interesting example of its use is an instructional Web Quest that was created by a small group of students, none with Web experience, in just two days.

The user interface and many menu commands in Open Websites are very similar to those in e-Portfolio, another Drupal-based Web application that the IDEA Studio has developed for use by faculty and students in the College. The IDEA Studio is also working on a Drupal-based Web tool that will allow instructors to easily create video case-based instruction. All of these applications exemplify a Web 2.0 interface: Web-based tools that allow users to dynamically create and add to Web content and communicate with others using the same tools.

The IDEA Studio is continuing to refine and improve Open Websites, creating more themes and working on shortening the URLs the application generates. More students will be trained to use the program in the coming semesters.

For more information about using Open Websites, contact Royce Kimmons.