The rhetoric of "forcing" her students is interesting here. Are we starting to see a difference between "required" course materials and course materials the students are "forced" to interact with?
Course management systems, like any other technology, have an inherent purpose implied in their design, and therefore a built–in pedagogy. Although these pedagogies are based on instructivist principles, today’s large CMSs have many features suitable for applying more constructivist pedagogies. Yet few faculty use these features, or even adapt their CMS very much, despite the several customization options. This is because most college instructors do not work or play much on the Web, and thus utilize Web–based systems primarily at their basic level. The defaults of the CMS therefore tend to determine the way Web–novice faculty teach online, encouraging methods based on posting of material and engendering usage that focuses on administrative tasks. A solution to this underutilization of the CMS is to focus on pedagogy for Web–novice faculty and allow a choice of CMS.
Reports on a study of students who took at least part of their education online
Karl Stolley's Online Design course homepage
Steve Krause's page for ENG 444: Writing for the World Wide Web
"For her class, Ms. Juhasz prodded students to think about YouTube by forcing them to perform all their coursework on the Google-owned site."