LESSONS FROM THE WEB

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In this monthly column, law professors comment on the many academic opportunities and challenges presented by Web technology.

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Updating and Maintaining Your Electronic Course Media

Sally Hadden, Florida State University College of Law

If you have infinite technical support for your webs and other electronic class media, then this essay really isn't for you. If you have a full-time, or even part-time, electronic elf who handles your maintenance issues and magically fixes computer problems as they appear, you are in an enviable minority. Consider yourself fortunate and count your blessings—you don't have to commit the time or effort to updating a website or maintaining a chatroom once it is constructed. For the rest of us, this essay offers some suggestions about winning the continuing struggle to keep existing webs and electronic course media in tip-top shape.

I want to suggest that you view your webpages in the same light that you see your automobile. The acquisition of your car was probably time-consuming, filled with much thought and consideration, in much the same way you probably poured a fair bit of your creative energy into originally designing a good class website. But just like an automobile, your website needs to be given a regular tune-up and thorough road check on a periodic basis. No car runs forever without maintenance—and no set of electronic course media will continue to function at peak efficiency without your recurring attention. How frequently you need to rotate the tires and change the oil for your website will depend on your particular situation.

Let's consider a typical professor's suite of electronic course materials. It probably contains a personal homepage with links to a series of course homepages, and perhaps an electronic chat room for students. Each course might have the following kinds of pages:

  • a course homepage
  • a course syllabus
  • class announcements
  • a FAQ sheet ("frequently asked questions" that deal with repetitive class questions)
  • tips for success in the course like "how to study evidence effectively" or "how to write a better brief"
  • an archive of class discussions
  • the entrance to a chat room where students discuss class material
  • suggestions for class writing assignments (e.g., possible paper topics, a style sheet for written submissions) or clinical situations (e.g., how to question a new client)
  • assessment devices (electronic student assignments with deadlines)
  • a list of lecture topics
  • past course exams
  • model exam answers
  • links to other websites that are related to the course material
Make a list of the types of the content you provide on your course website. [You can see some of mine by clicking my homepage.]

Now let's rearrange this list, thinking of how frequently the contents will change during a given semester.

    No Changes Once Posted (Low Maintenance)
  • course homepage
  • course syllabus
  • past course exams
  • model exam answers

    One-Time Only Changes (Sporadic Maintenance)

  • assessment devices (electronic student assignments with deadlines)
  • an archive of class discussions

    Changes a Few Times After Initial Posting (Medium Maintenance)

  • tips for success in the course
  • suggestions for writing assignments or clinical assignments
  • links to other websites that are related to the course material

    Changes Frequently After Initial Posting or Requires Regular Monitoring (High Maintenance)

  • class announcements
  • a course FAQ
  • a list of lecture topics
  • a class chat room
You may want to take your list and rearrange it in similar fashion, determining how frequently your website content changes.

Now consider these questions: how much time do I want to devote to running my website? And how frequently should I make changes to my media materials?

If your answer to the first question is "minimal," then you already have the answer to the second question. You'll want to include only low maintenance webpages and media options in your class website. You may choose to do this for one class instead of all your courses as your time commitments shift, as I've done with my graduate methods course this semester while I serve on a search committee. To limit your time spent on electronic course material, minimize the number of high maintenance pages you have or discussion rooms you run that will place continual demands on you for repeated posts or frequent monitoring. Focus on providing content that needs to be updated only once a semester, or only a few times a semester. You should realize that high maintenance pages are like a high-performance car—if you want to drive a Ferrari, that type of car will demand greater attention and time for maintenance. Before you consider adding any new material to your web, return to this initial question and test your resolve: if you are not willing to expend the time to maintain and update the material, don't raise your students' expectations (or your own) only to have them dashed later when you have no time to sustain the endeavor.

If your answer to the first question is "moderate" or "substantial," then you are well positioned mentally to tackle high maintenance media, with all the sustained effort they will require from you. The second question then becomes a central concern: how frequently should you make changes to your media materials? I recommend the following kind of schedule, based upon how often the pages need to be reviewed and revised. For low maintenance pages, I usually set aside a day before the semester begins to upload course homepages, syllabi, exams and answers. Those pages are then ready to go for the whole semester. Sporadic maintenance pages are similar: I'll only need to look at that type of page once, when I build and then post it, although I may be responding to material that comes from those pages (as student-generated emails or CGI-form responses) a few times a semester. Medium maintenance pages I revisit about once a month after they are initially loaded onto the server—do the links to other websites still work? Have I offered some suggestions (in person) for papers that should be included in the class webpage on paper composition? I try to look at my medium pages at the end of the month, and the changes may take an hour or two, or more, but then they are fixed for another month. In the context of a semester, that means that medium maintenance pages are reviewed three or four times after their initial posting.

The real time-draining course materials are the ones demanding frequent attention. High maintenance materials have to be reviewed or monitored much more frequently; for pages that change once a week, I leave them until Friday afternoon. Why Friday afternoon? Our faculty meetings take place on Friday afternoons, except on the weeks when they get cancelled due to lack of business, which is most weeks (a sensible arrangement which means that when the meeting occurs, there is real business to discuss). There are no other meetings cross-scheduled against the general faculty meeting, no office hours, no classes, no obligations of any kind. So I can count on a block of three hours every week on Friday—except when there's a meeting—to handle my high maintenance pages. For you, that block of time may occur Monday mornings, or Wednesday nights, but you need to locate that block of time and set it aside from the beginning of the semester for your weekly webwork. For chat rooms and high maintenance pages that demand daily attention, you will need to find that reliably vacant block of time every day. Perhaps yours is that first hour of the day when you drink your coffee, or the last hour of the day before you leave campus, but the best method is to have a standard time for maintaining your electronic media. It is analogous to rotating your car's tires every 10,000 miles or changing the oil at 3,000 miles. Being on a schedule will assure that your webpages continue to operate at peak efficiency.

When you arrive at the end of another semester, after classes are done and exams graded, take your website out for a comprehensive road test. At the end of term, we have more time to reflect about how our electronic media could be bettered—and more time to actually implement those changes. Use the break from teaching to look at your website the way that your new students (next semester) will do: can they easily find their way around your site? What features need to be reconfigured? How could the navigation devices be better positioned? Do you still like the font and appearance of the text, or should you alter the look of your website to make it more readable? Maybe lime green and mauve don't look as good now as they did at the beginning of term. Call upon the assistance of others: ask a colleague or student to work their way through your website, and encourage them to make suggestions for improvements. Don't be satisfied with what you already have—go look at the websites built by other instructors in your area of expertise (or out of it) and see what their students can access. Are there features you could add? Is there a better way to arrange materials than the way your website is currently doing it? Using JURIST, you can readily find websites built by your electronic colleagues—you can kick their tires, and then go home to your garage and begin your electronic tinkering!

Sally E. Hadden is assistant professor of history and law at Florida State University, and a member of the editorial board for H-Law, the electronic forum for legal and constitutional historians. Her book about slave patrols will be published by Harvard University Press in 2001.

© 2000 by Sally Hadden. All rights reserved.
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 The views expressed in this column are solely those of its author, and do not reflect those of JURIST, its Advisory Board, its staff or its host institutions.
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