• Get course information
• Contact the instructor
• Read or download lecture notes
• Get assignments
• Ask questions and get answers
• Communicate with other students

CourseForum is incredibly easy to “install” on Linux, Windows, Mac,? FreeBSD, or Solaris and can be accessed from any web browser. Let’s take a look at this classroom software from the Linux point of view.

Getting and Installing

Since CourseForum even has its own server built in you can install CourseForum anywhere on a Linux machine. CourseForum comes in a single executable binary that starts and runs CourseForum on port 3455. So after you download the demo follow these steps (as either the root user or using sudo):

Untar the package into your servers’ document root (i.e. /var/www/html for Fedora /var/www in Ubuntu)

Change into the newly created directory (courseforum-linux) and issue the command:

./courseforum &

The CourseForum daemon will start and you can now point your browser to:

http://IP_OR_DOMAIN:3445

Where IP_OR_DOMAIN is either the IP address or domain the server is on.

CourseForum Admin Page

This address will take you to the front page of CourseForum. The first thing you will need to do (before you can do anything else) is set an administrative password. Once you do that you can access the administration page and start building your course. NOTE: The demo is restricted to only a single course. If you purchase the full version you can create unlimited courses.

As you can see (in the image to the left) all administration tasks are taken care of in one window. There isn’t a lot of admin work to do with this software which makes it an even better solution for busy instructors.

Some of the more important tasks your instructors will want to do are:

• Messages: This is really just the welcome message displayed on the front page of CourseForum.
• Custom Links: This isn’t really what it sounds like. What this feature does is allow you to create custom? commands that can do any number of things like formatting or integrating third-party content. There is a good how-to page on the CourseForum site to illustrate how these are created.
• RSS/Email Notification: If you want to enable RSS feeds and/or email notification on your CourseForum site you will have to enter the information for your SMTP server here.
• Web Views: This allows you to create a read-only version of the CourseForum. Since the basis of CourseForum is a wiki, any registered user will be able to edit pages, so you will want to be ablel to serve up versions of pages (such as Syllaubus, lectures, etc) that are read-only for the public to view.

There is one administrative task I would highly recommend. When you create a new course you will have to administer that course independently of the site administration (In other words it has its own admin page). Within the course administration page you will want to take care of at least two things:

• Check the “Only course administrator can create projects” check box.
• Under the Require Password dropdown select “To edit pages” otherwise any registered user can edit your course pages.

And that’s pretty much it. The rest of the tool works like a standard Wiki page.

Final Thoughts

If you have been looking for a tool to allow students (of any type) to not only stay current in your classroom but also be able to interact, CourseForum might very well be the solution for you. I have deployed it for a few teachers who have been very pleased with the results. It’s remarkably seasy to install, simple to use, reliable, and it’s a fairly cheap solution ($119.00 USD).

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All classes are in American or British English depending on the University or school that hosts the course. Most courses do not simply display textual contents but also multimedia like audio recordings, videos and flash presentations. The list has some links to even more courses at the end including a link to 1800 Open Courseware courses at the MIT for instance.

I guess this is an excellent opportunity to take courses that you are interested in without having to actually attend University or pay a fee. No signups are required either to access the courses.

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