improved Study.Net & SPIKE integration
Last year we surveyed students about technology at Wharton and heard resounding feedback about our multitude of online services. This comment is an accurate representation:
One of the biggest frustrations for students is the amount of time spent organizing our lives rather than learning. You can imagine when you are on a limited time budget how frustrating it is to spend 30 minutes pulling materials from multiple places.
As of November 2010, our courseware (webCafé), student portal (SPIKE), and electronic course materials service (Study.Net) remain distinct entities, but we’ve been working to better integrate them. The latest effort is SPIKE’s new links to Study.Net.
SPIKE, our student portal, has a My Courses section that aggregates information about each class a student is taking: links to the webCafe room, class list, syllabus, seating chart, and course evaluations.
Now we’ve added a link to Study.Net materials. Instead of going to Study.Net’s main page, the link takes you directly to the materials for the course. We’re planning to roll out this feature in webCafe soon.
There’s a lot integration work left to do, but hopefully this small change, when added to other changes we’ve been making (e.g.¸single sign-on), will help make life easier.