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So there has been talk of standardising the ways that materials are made available to students. Dundee University has a web based system called MyDundee that is supposed to be the standard virtual learning environment for the university. I haven't gotten around to using this yet. I have logged in several times but I find the entire system to be quite impenetrable and contrary to the user interaction experience that we teach about in the School of Computing. There are a number of problems that I have with the system, apart from the useability, one is that I am essentially being dictated to as to which tools I should use to engage with my students, as opposed to allowing me the academic judgement to select the best tools for the job. I am not convinced that a one size fits all approach is an appropriate way to deliver academic materials across all of the subject domains taught at Dundee. More seriously, is the fact that the minimum requirements for the MyDundee system don't match the teaching environment for my second year module. The students are required to learn and use Linux during this module, but Linux is unsupported in the published technical specifications, so I run the risk of having teaching materials for a module locked away in a system that isn't guaranteed to be accessible from the systems that the module is teaching which is a little Kafkaesque. Additionally, having bitten the bullet and logged into the system, I find that right now I am not even able to access any of the modules that I actually teach! The current system I use is a wordpress blog for each taught subject. This requires only that students have access to a relatively modern web browser if they want to get access to all of the materials for the module. Additionally the materials aren't locked away behind an access wall so anybody who is interested can access them. This has two benefits, firstly lecturers at other universities around the world have occasionally found interesting and useful ideas in my lecture materials, which is quite gratifying to me, and secondly it means that I am backing up the argument that studying at Dundee is about more than just the material covered but is about the experience of actually coming here and interacting with, at least in the case of the School of Computing, a fairly excellent group of highly motivated individuals. If open access to learning materials is good enough for MIT, Berkeley, Notre Dame, Yale, Tufts, and Stanford, then surely it is good enough for us?

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