Communicating in our digital society increasingly necessitates the ability to effectively use 21st century skills. Building a website is an excellent project for sharpening your digital skills — either alone or in collaboration with students, colleagues, or other educational partners. In addition, a website is an optimal place to showcase your work in scholarship, teaching, and service.
I have built websites for the following purposes:
- course management: websites provide a measure of flexibility for managing courses that programs like Blackboard do not (example: EED 375 course site for Spring 2016)
- faculty website: having a faculty site can help shape your digital footprint, and can be a reference tool for office hours and other information for students (example: Kiersten Greene’s faculty site)
- special events: if you’re running a conference, workshop, or any other special event that necessitates disseminating information and/or access to links for collaborative work, a website is the perfect place to host relevant information (example: site for ongoing professional development in a local school district)
There are many other reasons you might build a site:
- online academic journal
- art exhibit
- repository
- literature review
- data collection
- data analysis
- writing
…and so on.