During the spring semester of 1998, I used a class management website, called CourseInfo, as a teaching/learning tool. My experience with it was very positive. The course was an MBA capstone course. I teach this course on campus in a traditional classroom. The class meets once a week, on Tuesday evening, for three hours. There is no distance learning component. It is a traditional seminar, with about twenty students in the class. Students typically organize themselves into about five teams. CourseInfo is a class management set of webpages. The site consists of a number of different online modules, and I used it in a number of different ways to support the student learning experience.

The announcement feature on the homepage was a good place for general information and for an information backup to general email. Of course there's the standard page to set up the syllabus and course description. I noticed practical advantages in being able to communicate with individual students, a group of students, or all of my students at any time, without having to wait for the next class meeting. I had students upload all of the papers that they submit, and I graded them and sent them back.

A related benefit was my ability to manage the students' workload. For example, this class met once a week, on Tuesday nights. But because students were submitting papers by uploading them rather than turning in hardcopy, I wasn't limited to having Tuesday night due dates. Students had the ability to submit papers at any time. In practice, they frequently opted to have papers due on Sunday evenings or first thing Monday morning.

CourseInfo's communication module was probably the most used feature. Each team had a homepage, and they used its chatroom feature to hold online team meetings to work on their case preparations. This was pretty important, since students were all commuting, and arranging off-campus meeting sites was generally inconvenient.

The discussion board was the most active single feature. Because there were twenty students in the class, classroom discussions generally excluded several people... the shy ones. Initially, I decided to remedy this by using the discussion board as an extension of the classroom discussion. Thus students who were not as extroverted as others were able to participate actively in 'classroom' discussions. To energize the discussion board, I would usually seed it with a few cryptic comments of my own about the next class's reading assignment and what that might have to do with the assigned case. This made the discussion very relevant for the upcoming case presentations.

The discussion board became the 'hot' spot on the CourseInfo site. In addition to accomplishing its intended purpose of including shy students in the discussion, it emerged as an ongoing daily dialogue centered around course topics. By the third week of the semester, the quality of the written and oral case presentations shot up, and it stayed higher than I've ever seen it for the next twelve weeks. This, in turn, energized the in-class discussions.

Putting this all together, the total impact of using CourseInfo was greater than the sum of its parts. At least for this class, CourseInfo radically changed the nature of the learning experience. Students were used to having a one-night a week class 'meeting,' with perhaps one outside team meeting every two weeks to prepare assignments. The addition of CourseInfo metamorphosed the more traditional experience into an ongoing, interactive community of learners... literally active on a daily basis.