Skip to content
ADVERTISEMENT
Sign In
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Events
    • Virtual Events
    • Chronicle On-The-Road
    • Professional Development
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
  • More
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Events
    • Virtual Events
    • Chronicle On-The-Road
    • Professional Development
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
    Upcoming Events:
    College Advising
    Serving Higher Ed
    Chronicle Festival 2025
Sign In
News

Teaching With an Index Card: the Benefits of Free, Open-Source Tools

By Danica Savonick October 21, 2018

Every semester, thousands of faculty members create course websites on a learning-management system such as Blackboard or Canvas. Colleges purchase these platforms, which allow professors to post readings, send messages, and facilitate discussions among students. And yet these expensive, proprietary systems are rarely used outside of classrooms. Alternatively, teaching with free, open-source software, including the software upon which many of the world’s websites are actually built, creates a tremendous opportunity for students to develop transferable skills, actively shape their learning, and improve their digital literacy.

To continue reading for FREE, please sign in.

Sign In

Or subscribe now to read with unlimited access for as low as $10/month.

Don’t have an account? Sign up now.

A free account provides you access to a limited number of free articles each month, plus newsletters, job postings, salary data, and exclusive store discounts.

Sign Up

Every semester, thousands of faculty members create course websites on a learning-management system such as Blackboard or Canvas. Colleges purchase these platforms, which allow professors to post readings, send messages, and facilitate discussions among students. And yet these expensive, proprietary systems are rarely used outside of classrooms. Alternatively, teaching with free, open-source software, including the software upon which many of the world’s websites are actually built, creates a tremendous opportunity for students to develop transferable skills, actively shape their learning, and improve their digital literacy.

In my English classes, these discussions of digital learning spaces begin with an index card. One of my favorite classroom activities is called think-pair-share. It’s simple, and I use it to begin nearly every class. Each student is given an index card; they then have 90 seconds to respond to a prompt and 90 seconds to share their response with a partner. Then we go around the room, and students report back while I transcribe their remarks on a screen. The prompts are open-ended: Describe a transformative moment you experienced in the classroom. Or, What was the most important takeaway from the assigned reading? Students’ answers then become the material through which I teach the course, connecting their responses to key concepts and lessons.

2018 Innovators: 6 Programs to Change Classroom Culture - Cover
2018 Innovators: 6 Programs to Change Classroom Culture
What drives change in the classroom? This special report looks at how six institutions encourage innovation in teaching.
  • Faculty Members Can Build Relationships With Online Students. Here’s How.
  • How to Make Your Residence Halls Work Year-Round
  • We Must Help First-Generation Students Master Academe’s ‘Hidden Curriculum’
  • Why Incentives for Innovation Don’t Work

Think-pair-share works 100 percent of the time because of the material constraints it imposes. An index card is small; the most you can write is several sentences. Students have only 90 seconds, lowering levels of expectation and anxiety. Think-pair-share requires no bandwidth, no laptops, no software, and yet it offers a useful perspective on the technologies that educators incorporate in the classroom. In short, the index card is not neutral; it shapes how and what we write. That is point one of digital literacy.

Blackboard and other proprietary systems have their benefits. Using such systems means that students’ projects will not be visible in search results, which shields their identities and prevents them from publishing work that could otherwise be available to potential employers, internet trolls, or immigration and law-enforcement officials. Using a platform vetted by your college will probably not expose students or faculty members to violations of federal privacy laws. For those prohibited from using alternatives, discussing the advantages and shortcomings of these proprietary platforms can help students increase their digital literacy.

However, many such platforms confine learning within a walled garden that maintains a hierarchical, unilateral relationship between teacher and students and reinforces the classroom’s isolation from the outside world. Using the sheltered, default institutional space means that students aren’t learning to think critically and carefully about how they present their identity online. They aren’t learning to assess the risks and rewards of different tools in order to select the right one for the task they want to achieve. And they certainly aren’t learning how to build websites. Instead, students become trained, through the Blackboard interface, to see the course as a standardized, reproducible, institutional product, rather than a creative project in which they play an active role designing and shaping.

In my experience, digital literacy can best be taught when faculty members are allowed to teach with free, open-source, and customizable content-management systems, including those that allow students to build websites and write for a larger public. While the institutions where I’ve worked have had Blackboard contracts, I have always opted instead to teach with WordPress, because so many websites are built using that software. When I teach students to use WordPress, they are acquiring knowledge they can take into the world and use beyond the classroom. After teaching them to navigate our course website, I then take them into the administrative dashboard of WordPress so they can see how the platform works. Often I allow students to build their own WordPress sites for their final projects.

Through these scaffolded interactions, students learn that, much like an index card, platforms like WordPress structure how we compose, organize, and encounter information.

In addition to making students familiar with a widely used content-management system, I also teach with Hastac, a nonprofit, academic social network and blogging platform that connects student writers to 16,000 network members. Hastac describes itself as “an interdisciplinary community of humanists, artists, social scientists, scientists, and technologists” working to make the world more equitable by improving pedagogy through critical explorations of digital technologies. I currently serve on the steering committee of Hastac, which was founded in 2002 by Cathy N. Davidson and David Theo Goldberg. It has transformed my teaching by providing a digital space for my students to publish their writing.

Unlike many other free digital platforms, Hastac is committed to never sharing users’ data with third parties. It offers a crucial platform for safely reading new perspectives, exchanging writing, and conversing beyond the silos of our classrooms, disciplines, and institutions.

Learning with Hastac allows students to gain experience with writing not only for a professor, but also for an audience beyond the classroom. It helps them understand that they are participants in continuing conversations, and that learning offers an opportunity to contribute to the public and social good.

But we have to be careful in encouraging students to join these conversations: careful because they are capable but still learning, because public writing always entails the risk of exposure, because students have complicated lives that may require the cover of confidentiality, and because digital interactions leave traces everywhere. The risks inherent in public work are real, and in many contexts an instructor may decide that those risks outweigh the benefits. To mitigate the risks, I always give students the option to publish anonymously or with a pseudonym, or to opt out of public writing altogether.

ADVERTISEMENT

Teaching with WordPress and Hastac creates opportunities for students to think about the implications of the myriad digital platforms that have come to structure so much of our daily lives. We have important conversations about website organization, data, privacy, navigation, user-experience design, accessibility, the differences between proprietary and open-source software, and the potential benefits and risks of learning and writing in public.

If colleges want to make good on their promises to prepare students for the world beyond the classroom, they should invest in alternatives that allow educators to teach digital skills safely and ethically. Like the index card, our course websites are not neutral. They shape how and what we learn.

A version of this article appeared in the October 26, 2018, issue.
Read other items in 2018 Innovators: 6 Programs to Change Classroom Culture.
We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.
Tags
Innovation & Transformation
Share
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Facebook
  • Email
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT

More News

Protesters attend a demonstration in support of Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, March 10, 2025, in New York.
First Amendment Rights
Noncitizen Professors Testify About Chilling Effect of Others’ Detentions
Photo-based illustration of a rock preciously suspended by a rope over three beakers.
Broken Promise
U.S. Policy Made America’s Research Engine the Envy of the World. One President Could End That.
Wednesday, June 11, 2025 Tucson, Arizona—Doctor Andrew Capaldi poses for a portrait at his lab at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona on Wednesday, June 11, 2025. CREDIT: Ash Ponders for Chronicle
Capaldi Lab—
Research Expenses
What Does It Cost to Run a Lab?
Research illustration Microscope
Dreams Deferred
How Trump’s Cuts to Science Funding Are Derailing Young Scholars’ Careers

From The Review

University of Virginia President Jim Ryan keeps his emotions in check during a news conference, Monday, Nov. 14, 2022 in Charlottesville. Va. Authorities say three people have been killed and two others were wounded in a shooting at the University of Virginia and a student is in custody. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)
The Review | Opinion
Jim Ryan’s Resignation Is a Warning
By Robert Zaretsky
Photo-based illustration depicting a close-up image of a mouth of a young woman with the letter A over the lips and grades in the background
The Review | Opinion
When Students Want You to Change Their Grades
By James K. Beggan
Photo-based illustration of a student and a professor, each occupying a red circle in a landscape of scribbles.
The Review | Opinion
Meet Students Where They Are? Maybe Not.
By Mark Horowitz

Upcoming Events

Chronfest25_Virtual-Events_Page_862x574.png
Chronicle Festival: Innovation Amid Uncertainty
07-16-Advising-InsideTrack - forum assets v1_Plain.png
The Evolving Work of College Advising
Lead With Insight
  • Explore Content
    • Latest News
    • Newsletters
    • Letters
    • Free Reports and Guides
    • Professional Development
    • Events
    • Chronicle Store
    • Chronicle Intelligence
    • Jobs in Higher Education
    • Post a Job
  • Know The Chronicle
    • About Us
    • Vision, Mission, Values
    • DEI at The Chronicle
    • Write for Us
    • Work at The Chronicle
    • Our Reporting Process
    • Advertise With Us
    • Brand Studio
    • Accessibility Statement
  • Account and Access
    • Manage Your Account
    • Manage Newsletters
    • Individual Subscriptions
    • Group and Institutional Access
    • Subscription & Account FAQ
  • Get Support
    • Contact Us
    • Reprints & Permissions
    • User Agreement
    • Terms and Conditions
    • Privacy Policy
    • California Privacy Policy
    • Do Not Sell My Personal Information
1255 23rd Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037
© 2025 The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Chronicle of Higher Education is academe’s most trusted resource for independent journalism, career development, and forward-looking intelligence. Our readers lead, teach, learn, and innovate with insights from The Chronicle.
Follow Us
  • twitter
  • instagram
  • youtube
  • facebook
  • linkedin