Blogs and wikis

For a project I am working on right now, we are leaning toward using blogs and wikis.  The blogs will be used to keep students informed of updates to their classes, upcoming events, and more similarly to the announcements section of Blackboard.  The Wiki will be so students can work on definitions and summaries of webinars. 

The design and implementation challenges we as managment are running into now is how to host the blog and wiki.  We are still working on which Learning Managment System we want to use, so we are not sure how to house these still.  Also, we do not want the students to have to log into other software at the risk of making everything more difficult.  So from a management side, we are trying to find the best way to mesh all this together. 

Another issue we have is building value in the blog and wikis for the students.  We are overcoming this hurdle by building them into the program as much as possible.  Also, the library of blogs and wikis grows, it will be a metaphorical flywheel of information whereby more students will access it because it will be bigger and it will be bigger because more students will access it and so on.

If the students were to implement this, it would be even more challenging.  Right now, the site does not have place for such comments or a blog. So, they would need to set up an outside blog or use Youtube to repost the webinars (and run into licensing issues).