How to organise class sites in Microsoft Learning Gateway

Introduction

The two main reasons for creating class sites are

1. Use as a collaboration site for the teachers and students in that class
2. Used to populate the list of sites/classes when the teacher clicks on E-learning actions when using SLK

Typically these sites all get created using the same template, but if that's too limiting for you there's no reason why they shouldn't use different templates.

Permissions on the sites can be set on an individual user basis on by creating class based SharePoint or Active Directory groups and assigning the permissions to the groups.

In a typical MLG/SLK set up this leads to creating a site per class/teaching group in the school. Although this creates a large number of sites there are advantages

1. Having the individual classes show up immediately on clicking on E-learning actions allows the teachers to quickly drill down to who they want to assign resources to. This is the most convenient way for the teacher to assign the work.
2. SharePoint 2007 will only show sites in the navigation which a user has access to.

Another factor in the organisation is that the learning resources do not have to be present in the class site. They do not even have to be present in a site accessible to the learners, so could, for instance be in a staff departmental site.

Possible Organisations

The most common set ups are

1. All sites are Class collaboration sites. In this case all classes are created as separate sites, which are accessible to the relevant students and teachers which can then use them for collaboration - sharing documents, discussion groups, calendars etc.
2. All class sites are hidden. In this set up all classes are created as sites, and the teachers and students are given the appropriate permissions so that they can be used by SLK to assign resources. However, the sites are hidden so no-one can go to them and are not used as collaboration sites.
3. A mix of hidden and collaboration sites. In this set up some of the sites are hidden as per possibility 2 and some are collaboration sites as per possibility 1. The hidden ones would normally be for the lower years and the collaboration sites for the upper years where there's more class specific work and discussion taking place. This would be an example of where different templates could be used for the hidden and collaboration classes.

Typically all the sites are created in one parent site - the Classes site in MLG. You can certainly split them over different parent sites such as subject or year sites. This might be a particularly relevant solution if using option 3. With the automatic hiding of classes the users don't have permission on, this is more helpful for the teachers then the students in creating a hierarchy. It also breaks the My Classes web part as that only looks at the sites within one parent site. I am thinking of extending that though to look at multiple parent sites if there's a demand for it.

Other possible set ups which I have come across have been used to limit the number of sites created in a hosted situation where multiple schools are using the same platform.

1. One site per subject year combination e.g. sites for Year 10 Maths, Year 11 Maths, Year 10 English etc.
2. One site per subject

In these cases you would definitely assign permissions on a group basis to enable class based assignment of resources.

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