Good examples of "online courses" web sites?

June 18, 2005 11:18 AM

I've been asked to build a web site for a company that is offering online courses--the kind where you sign up and there is a series of steps one has to complete, not the kind where it's just an archive of study material. People pay, register, complete weekly assignments, etc. I'm looking for a) good examples of sites that do this; b) good examples of sites that market this (ie, not as concerned about the "assignments/courses" aspects as the "why you should study with us" and "look how we offer this stuff up" aspects); c) feedback from anyone who has taken such a course and has opinions on what worked/didn't work well regarding it. Thanks!
posted by dobbs to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Open Learning Initiative.
posted by Gyan at 1:54 PM on June 18, 2005

Dobbs, it sounds like you are being asked to reinvent the wheel here. You know about online learning packages such as Blackboard and WebCT, yes? This AskMe had a good discussion of the pros and cons of Blackboard., and a few suggestions for open source alternatives.

Does that help?
posted by LarryC at 6:36 PM on June 18, 2005

Response by poster: LarryC, no, I just didn't give enough info. I will not be doing any of the course-related programming. For that, the back end will be handled by a third party (ecollege, I think). However, the rest of the site, which will serve to market the course, and provide reasons for why one should study with this company, is my responsibility.

For that, I want to look at some other companies who are doing a similar thing and providing compelling reasons why their services should be chosen over the competition.

It's not an area of expertise which I'm familiar with (most of my web clients are either gov't/union related or, um, artists (rock bands and painters and such)). I just wanted to get a feel for what was out there for schools and what students thought worked.

Thanks for the link to that old thread though. Hadn't seen that. (And thanks Gyan.)
posted by dobbs at 7:54 PM on June 18, 2005

take a look at Moodle to Quoe from the site

"Moodle is a course management system (CMS) - a free, Open Source software package designed using sound pedagogical principles, to help educators create effective online learning communities. You can download and use it on any computer you have handy (including webhosts), yet it can scale from a single-teacher site to a 40,000-student University. This site itself is created using Moodle, so check out the Moodle Features demos, the Demonstration Courses or read the latest Moodle Buzz."

I have set it up before. It is pretty nice. The big beifit from my view is that it is easy to clone or exports classes for reuse.
posted by jumpsuit_boy at 6:23 PM on June 19, 2005