Case Study: Blogs@Baruch
A ReclaimEDU Case Study
Blogs@Baruch is a pioneering platform which supports 10,000 student sites and 63,000 registered users to blog at scale. You might say it’s blogging as an enterprise level service .
In this case study we hear from Christopher Silsby, Project Manager for Blogs@Baruch, based at the Educational Technology Office, who tells the story of:
- Blogs@Baruch's founding and early development;
- How the platform has developed over nearly two decades;
- Looking ahead to future developments.
Read an Excerpt from the Case Study
Over nearly two decades, Blogs@Baruch has established itself as a much-loved and vital part of the student experience at Baruch. It has not only grown into a stalwart of the teaching and learning infrastructure, the team has also adapted and evolved it to reflect the fast moving web students navigate today. Christopher expands on a key issue:
Students being able to publish their own thoughts, their own writing on Blogs@Baruch has become a fundamental part of their experience and yet we recognise that working on the open web is not always the most appropriate option. We have developed plug-ins that offer more flexibility, giving faculty and students choice over how openly they work and who to share their work with: whether it’s openly on the web or just in that one classroom.
Christopher Silsby, Project Manager for Blogs@Baruch
Christopher and his colleague are able to tweak and customize the platform using open source tools and plug-ins in response to the changing needs of the community.
As the service continues to evolve, it doesn’t just serve the current student population, but becomes a history of its community, too, retaining sites created by generations of classes. Whether it is a discussion board, course conversations, or a website, students develop digital capabilities as they create and maintain their own space on Blogs@Baruch, from simple text to rich multimedia content. Together they experiment and learn to write and create on the web.
