Using Google Classroom to teach a community WordPress course

Ben (Presenter): Hi, everybody. I'm Ben Dunkle. I will talk about Google Classroom and how I used it recently to teach a community WordPress course. Let me just get started.

I am just going to say a few things about me. I am a full-time professor at Canisius College, in Buffalo, New York. We were honored to have to have WPCampus in Beefalo in 2018. I am a WordPress.org core contributor and I organize numerous Buffalo WordCamps and a monthly meetup. If you're in Buffalo and want to meet up, even virtually, that's how we will do it from now on.

There is a link to the slides, if you want to make a note of that.

This course came about from Canisius' lifelong learning. We offer various courses to the community, short courses, four, five, or six weeks, on a variety of topics, mainly humanities-related. The courses are inexpensive. I think the website says $60, but that varies. It's generally not something that's cost-prohibitive. Canisius is a great community, and it's a great way to keep in touch with the alumni, for those who want to keep in touch and to keep their learning going.

I decided to teach a WordPress course. I've done a lot of work with WordPress. I've taught it in my courses and at meetups. I had to consider a few things about how this would look. This was more hands-on. Teaching technology courses, you deal with software, you help people try to learn specific things that don't necessarily translate to a humanities kind of course.

So I thought it would be fun to try. I wanted to see how it would work. We wanted to figure out what the optimal format would be. Most of the other courses, it's just a powwow. You sit around a table with your notes, and everybody talks. But for these courses, you need the lab, the computers, and the resources at the college. This would be people from the community. I had no idea what people I would get. They were invited to bring their laptops, but they could use the software and computers on campus. I knew I would get a different user base, people from all walks of life and different organizations. But I had a good idea of the kinds of students that would enroll.

I was concerned with how I would break the course up. WordPress is very, very big. There is a lot of learn about. I only had five sessions to cover a broad spectrum of things.

I also had to make sure that we had the right tools. I didn't want to use anything that was inaccessible. Whatever we were teaching, I wanted to make sure it was something that could be taken home or taken into a person's environment, to be looked over and reviewed, so they wouldn't have to come to the college to do it.

Lastly, how would we assess the outcomes of the course? How could I make sure the people taking the course were adequately instructed, that they really got something out of it? Those were some of my initial questions about running this course.

I have been using Google Classroom for a while, first in the fall of 2018. At that point, I had used Google Classroom at least once as my main tool for a semester-long course. I liked it for some reasons; there were other things I didn't like about it. I could leverage the college's G Suite, for storage and things, so students could watch videos and download files without interruptions. That was really important to make sure it was accessible to as many users as we could get.

I also like that the indexing, searchability, and organization of the content were appealing to me.

We use D2L as our main tool for distributing course content for reasons I will talk about. You couldn't use that in a community-based course.

I also like how Google Classroom manages the content. It's optimal, it looks good, and it has a nice breakdown of sections, topics, materials, and so on. Again, there are some issues, and I will be talking about those, as wheel.

Going into it, I really had some basic questions about what would be the outcome. Mainly, how many students would enroll? The lifelong-learning courses were low in enrollment, about 10 to 15 students. I like that many, because it gives me a base to see how effective the course is. The feedback I would get would be too limited. I was concerned about low numbers of enrollment, but that could change.

I also had concerns about student expectations. One student may have one expectation, and another student might have something else in mind. I had to manage things and set up a course that would be good for lots of different students. That led me to think about obstacles. I've taught WordPress courses, and there are ongoing obstacles I can usually identify going in. That, to me, is something that you can't get around. We'll talk about some of these obstacles.

I started off, after coming up with basic answers to these questions in my mind, by planning the course in five pieces. I wanted to make sure I covered the broadest range of content over those five. It was cutting it up. How do you define five discernible areas of WordPress that can be offered in a sequence or as sessions?

I came up with five things. Getting Started is week one. We talk about the WP-Admin in week two. Content Management is week three. Going Live is week four. You might remember Cyber Studio from the '90s. Finally, Tips and Tricks was the last, fun day of class. Let's walk through what I did in these sessions.

The first week was the usual introductions, going around the room and talking about yourself, giving us background and why you're here. We talk about WordPress and what it is, for people confused about what it means for something to be a WordPress website. This leads to the WordPress.org or WordPress.com. Most people were familiar with WordPress.com. It was important to lay the groundwork and understand that this course was focused more on WordPress.org, as far as the software.

In the first class, we get into WordPress hosting. Students ask, what should I host? What should I be? What should I sign up with? I try to delay these questions until later, but they always come up in the first week.

I tried to build a Multisite so people can understand how to work with the content. We logged into accounts that were set up. We looked at basic settings.

In a two-hour course, I try to get through these bullet points in the first hour, and then I hand out a worksheet for the second hour that has step-by-step screenshots and instructions for students to review what we did in the demonstration in the first half.

The next week, we went into the WP-Admin. I gave them starter content. WordPress released a starter content post that could be used for testing. We used that starter content so students had something to play with, long text, short text, photographs, and so on, a good way to get them to work with content.

Then we went into managing users. User managing is a core part of WordPress. We can think about the hierarchy that informs the WordPress universe. Students can also think about their role that they play in the management of the website.

The theme and the content are two sides of the same coin. Content and format are different from each other. If you have a different theme, it might look different, but the content can still be the same. A theme is just a color of paint.

We get into working with the customizer. Some students like it, especially if they come from a WordPress.com background. We talk about two ways to do things. One is in the customizer. Or, you can be in the regular WordPress portion.

Then we get into adding plugins, which gets to how WordPress is as barebones out of the box, that certain plugins will extend it and make it easier for people who are not developers to include powerful features on their websites.

Week three was content management. This was a really heavy week. Any part of WordPress that I can consider being a core content-management feature we worked through, like publishing things. What does it mean for something to be published? Pages and posts and the fundamentally different status from content. We talked about taxonomies, how content can be described in different ways and have different content.

When I taught this, Gutenberg wasn't core yet. There are title and content areas that look classic. Since then, we have adjusted the content for Gutenberg instruction.

Custom fields and how those extend the content and add more information about it.

Menus and links.

Where the media section is. We went into quite a bit of detail with media, how images are stored, where they are stored, their naming conventions, issues with media. In fact, this whole media section really could be its own section. It would probably be in the second part, next time.

Sidebars and widgets.

And, finally, comments, which is part of the core part of the management part of WordPress.

The next week, we went into going live, taking WordPress from its state of development, wherever that me be, and moving it somewhere else. I just felt like I lost students. There are plugins that are very helpful. Backing up your site can be done with a number of excellent plugins. But migrating the site is different, taking that backup and putting it somewhere else. That was technical and difficult for some students.

Where are you migrating it to? Who is hosting your site? We turned to the hosting discussion. What kind of hosting would you need for your website? Do you have a large website, or a small website? Can you host with other sites?

Most students were very concerned with hosting. They wanted to know if their hosting was good, if they should move hosting, and what was the best host. That ended up being a long discussion.

I wanted to make sure students know that WordPress has a database and what it looks like. We looked at the fields and tables, and we use database tools.

We talk about file management, using FTP clients and using the file managers if you have cPanel. Then we look at server tools.

This is all about, what do you do about your site now that it's ready for production, ready for the public?

Part five is like leftovers, different ways of logging in, how the WordPress login works, screen options, securing a site . . . Security can be its own class. If you want to do coding on your site, what are the different methods? I keep this last class flexible, with new tips and tricks. We need another class for the content-management section, but I like this final class because it's a nice wind-down.

I have a few conclusions. I have a few minutes to talk about some of those questions that came into my head at the beginning of doing this and where they led.

How many would enroll? Not a lot. It's great to have one student, because you can pour everything you have in that one student, and give them as much as they possibly can get. They each have their unique questions. The fewer students, the more you can spend on an individual basis for each one.

But the college wants to make money from this. This is not their primary reason, but they would like to see more students enrolling. I didn't much on this. I could probably work more on newspapers and make more money.

Were their expectations met? What were their expectations? I had hobbyists . . . I thought I was going to get students that were really connected to the college but were not working with organizations, and they were tasked for managing WordPress websites. I didn't get as many of those students as I thought I would.

I also got students that were curious. What is WordPress? How could they benefit from this?

In terms of those obstacles that I mentioned earlier . . . The .org and .com discussion — those from the .com background felt comfortable knowing that the core software could be used anywhere. The other obstacle was technology, which I'll talk about in a minute. That wasn't really resolved.

In terms of the Google Classroom challenges, bleeding-edge tools, which is what Google Classroom is . . . As wonderful as it, it is still difficult. It's filled with unused features that get in the way. If you don't use one of the streams, one of the main tabs, which I don't . . . the organizing section.

And then grades. I don't use the grades. It's there. Then there are students. Getting a list of students to actually enroll in the Google Classroom was difficult. Even though I told them to do it, to go to this website, sign up, and put your e-mail in, half of them did that. I couldn't really communicate with them through Google Classroom. I had to use my mail software, which isn't enough. People don't get their e-mails, or they don't check them enough, or they get spam.

I may have e-mailed students several times that class was going to be cancelled, or students e-mail me that they weren't going to be there and I never got it.

It really goes fast, it's hard to keep up with course development. You have to update so often.

And, everybody is on a different page with technology.

That's what I'm trying to overcome.

There were some great things about teaching it. The different segments, the different kinds of students and backgrounds made a nice environment. The smaller groups gave me a chance to work one-on-one with students, a silver lining to not having many.

Community students have a clearer set of expectations that they are willing to share upfront. "My boss wants me to do this." "I have an idea for this great product." I love teaching students with those clear goals.

The tools that we were using, the accessibility they offered, really helped, really worked out. All the free software, even if it's not open-source, Local by Flywheel. The tools are essential. I'm looking at tools not tied to a specific platform that have no cost.

The next time I teach this, I will have reviewed the development and technology. I will update my materials to focus on Gutenberg. I want to really improve my platform, making sure students have an ideal environment to work with, and that they are on the same page, regardless of the software they have access to.

We need to promote the course better. It's fun to teach three students, but I want three or eight.

Course evaluations and assessment will become part of the core of the course. I have only offered the course twice and I had a total of 12 students.

I have a few links and resources at the end of the presentation. You can go to the actual classroom with this class code. You can watch courses of me teaching the site. I would like to offer the course to everybody, watching myself lecture and following along with the handouts.

Teaching WordPress is something I had been thinking about for a while. If you would like to look at that presentation at the bottom, you can watch me deliver it.

I thought we could spend some time with Q&A. I'm really looking for feedback from you guys. I would like to hear your advice and tips, things that you have come across that are beneficial. Anything like that would be super welcome. I'll spend some time fielding questions if we have any, or listening to your comments. Hopefully, you have some.

Eric (Room Host): Thanks, Ben. For now, I will leave that last slide up, because there's some important information there.

We have two questions that have been submitted. I believe you kind of answered one of them.

"What kind of formats did you use in the course?" They gave the examples of discussions, videos, demos, and so on. What was the most effective?

Ben: The format of the course . . . I will go to the link here. I can kind of walk you through this. I hope you can all see the screen here.

This stream thing does nothing for me. I don't use it. I probably could, if I used it more, but I didn't use it. I used this with my own courses, and I never found the stream particularly useful.

The classroom is broken up into sections. For each section, I have slides. These are the slides for the first part of the class, and this file goes with what I'm explaining.

The second file is the classwork. Whoops! It's a little wonky. Here's the classwork, creating a WordPress website. I gave them this to do for the next class.

If you look at the classwork files — this is a little bit different. If you go to the week two classwork, it's a set of Google slides that walk through what I did in my demonstration. So, it includes screenshots of the steps that I took, so the student can then either follow along with the Google slides, doing the classwork, or they can watch the class I screencast, and I go into the video that goes with the course.

I'm screencasting, and using Camtasia, which isn't free or accessible in that regard. But it's helpful.

Anyway, that's pretty much what I used Google Classroom for, this classwork and the way it organizes the content. Like I said, the people don't sign up, or they didn't.

Finally, grades. I used Google Classroom in my classes. I do the grades in D2L, which is for the college, because the students are more used to that, and because it ties into other systems that we have within the college. I would like to use grades, but it's pretty much useless. I just want my classwork to come up. This is what I mean, the extra things that show up that don't necessarily help.

I hope that answers that question. It's three components: slides I'm using in lecture, slides for the students, and a video I use as soon as I'm done with the lecture.

Eric: Great. Perfect. Thank you.

We received another question. I think you may have answered this a little bit on your last slide. "How has this course evolved with the changes in WordPress, like the block editor and the block library."

Ben: Gutenberg is essentially the codename for how the editing process happens now. It hasn't. The next time I teach this course, I'm going to have to rip apart the one slide here . . . Here, when we have "Content Management," "Title and content," this bullet will come out and say "Content blocks" or "Gutenberg."

If you look at the slide from part three, I mean the classwork for part three . . . it's going to be me going through the section on posts and taking out these screenshots, and putting in screenshots for the way that WordPress works now. "Titles and Content." This is going to have to change completely.

So, all of these slides will have to get redone by the next time I teach it. Luckily, I didn't print a book. But I did print handouts. One of the biggest time-consuming things was the handouts. Every time I came into the class, I would have a stack of printed classwork. I would staple them and give one to each of the students. They really like that. There's something about having a physical copy of something. They can write notes on it. Being able to take that with them, in their bags and stuff, I don't think is dead. Print is not dead yet. At some point, it would be great to put this into a book format, but what's the point when the screenshots will change every other day? I don't know.

Eric: It seems like there's a lot of opportunity there. I appreciate that answer. It sounds like there's a lot you have to wait and see on.

We received feedback from the chat and within the Q&A tool that mentioned the class link in the last slide might have had a typo in it that is preventing attendees from viewing it. We can check that out later and update the link in the attendees channel, if you'd like.

Ben: Let's see if I can do it live here. I wonder if it's the link. Okay, I'll, um . . . I'll make sure that link is updated. I'm sorry about that. It has something to do with the URL, yes, you're right. I just highlighted it, and copied and pasted it, which was not smart. I will update that.

Eric: "Have you followed up with any students to see how they're using the knowledge from this course?"

Ben: That's a great question. No. I have to do that next time. The one reason is that I had a very hard time getting them to communicate with me in the first place. I'm kind of wrong about that. There are two students I communicated with, but not nearly to the extent that I should. It's hard to insist that they communicate back. I mean, I can e-mail them, I can e-mail them, and it's really up to them to respond. Although I did attempt to get feedback, it was not as successful as I would like. I need to find more strategies, better strategies for followup. That's a great question, and it's one of the challenges I'm dealing with in terms of my own teaching, forcing students to give me feedback.

Eric: All right, we have an additional question, asking, "Would the BuddyPress button add value to discussion with student groups?"

Ben: Um . . . it could. It would be another . . . My only thought on that is that it would potentially be another interface for students to get familiar with, another social-media platform for them to learn.

One of the things that I have noticed is that, the more cluttered, the more distraction, the more stuff in front of a student, even if it's there to help, even if it's there as a way to improve their communication, it seems to be counteractive, counterintuitive, counterproductive, to some extent. Using e-mail, I have to think, is the most effective way. It might be more of a cultural thing. When you first meet the group of students like this, how do you get them to be more receptive to communicating outside of the class, and to stay connected beyond just this one class? Maybe BuddyPress can do that. I am not sure. That's a good point.

I do think the Multisite feature works really well. If you have a group of students learning WordPress, having them all on Multisite is a good starting point. You have the same plugins that each can play with. That is part of the goal of having an equal playing field. I haven't used BuddyPress in years, so I couldn't even speak to . . . What do you think? Do you think there are some features that would be helpful?

Eric: Ben, similarly, on that topic, do you have a line you draw in the sand for where to go with contributed plugins versus core WordPress features? There are so many different tools out there, once you start diving into the ecosystem, that could be helpful, but it could also provide that cognitive overload that you mentioned.

Ben: Right. When we get into plugins . . . In which course? Okay, so, yeah, in part two, where we talk about plugins, I go over what I consider to be best practices for plugins, when you should use them, how plugins affect performance on your site, how to choose a plugin. If you know you need a plugin, how do you pick one? Several claim to do the same thing.

I'm very plugin-cautious, and I try to instill that in the students, that they should be really careful about plugins. Before you install them, think about whether you're doing a good thing here, and try to get a second opinion. Half of the time, you don't need it. So, that is definitely part of my approach to the content, is to keep them aware, keep them striving for a lead base of code for their site.

Male Speaker: I think that's good, and that actually gets us to 1:45 p.m. Eastern. We are about out of time. Ben, I would like to thank you for your presentation, and for giving this presentation today. Thank you very much.

Male Speaker: Thank you, too. I really enjoyed it.