A site to watch
I’m not sure if this website has been mentioned before, but I thought I would bring it to the class’ attention. Purdue Online has been in existence for a few years now. It currently consists of 4, 575 members. It already supports many of the ideas presented in class such as the following:
Classified advertisements for buying or selling books, for apartments, for finding a ride
Professor and class ratings and reviews
Schoolwork help
Events and nightlife listings
Those are just to name a few…
I guess this website could be looked at in terms of what is missing and what we could do better with what they already provide.
The motto of the site is very powerful “for students, by students.” The forums within the site are also posted on quite frequently.
Great find Sarah.
Interestingly enough I hadn’t heard of that site, but Susie and I came up with a very similar slogan to “By students. For Students”. While I see this site in some ways as competition – at first glance it seems a little more purely information oriented – although the main postings about what’s happening on campus are intriguing.
After a quick glance around what I did notice is that there isn’t as much “For Sale” or “For Free” stuff as we had talked about wanting in class, to get people to come into our site – or even as a main purpose for our site. In addition, the ride board is not well used – and the textbook section is not well-organized. It would be great to have links to commentaries on textbooks as well as to the courses that require them.
That being said – I’m not sure that we want to compete with them on certain levels – perhaps we need a different overarching goal – or perhaps we want to appeal to a different group of students – grad students maybe? I’m not sure whether PurdueOnline is mostly undergrads or graduate students – but maybe having a narrower focus initially – particularly given that we are more familiar with grad student perspectives would be helpful.
E.g. We could include feedback on workshops, the IRB process, how to survive, chats on time management, chats on how to have a social life and still pass your class and publish research… any and all of the myriad of things that make up graduate life…
Thoughts?
Awesome.