The Duke-hosted version of WordPress is now available for faculty to use for their courses this fall. WordPress is a popular blogging and flexible website creation tool that faculty can use for course sites, blogs, student website projects and more. Visit the new Duke WordPress website (https://sites.duke.edu) for more, including WordPress basics and instructions on how faculty can create course sites now!
The Duke WordPress site also includes several examples collected during the pilot phase of the program (Fall 2009-Spring 2010). A few ideas to get you started:
Use WordPress for a course website
Keith Wilhite created a WordPress site for his Writing 20 course that included his course syllabus, schedule and materials. Read more about his site here.
Use WordPress for blogging publicly on particular themes or topics
Laurent Dubois and Christine Erlien used WordPress to create blogs around specific themes, and asked students in their respective courses to contribute content as part of their course assignments.
Students in Laurent Dubois’s World Cup, World Politics course posted regularly to the site and worked in teams to complete a set of ‘Soccer Politics Pages’ – essentially multimedia web versions of what would have traditionally been research papers. Read more here.
Students in several of Christine Erlien’s Writing 20 courses contributed their research to the blog ‘Teaching and Learning with Google Earth.’ Read more here.
Use WordPress for team website projects
Students in Gary Gereffi’s Organizations and Global Competitiveness course worked in teams to create websites detailing their research on a particular product or industry. See examples of the students’ work and read more here.