Concourse

Concourse is a piece of web software that focuses course management around a collaborative, "living" syllabus. Instructors log into Concourse to create, view, and update syllabi, which are just as easy to create in Concourse as in a word processor, such as Microsoft Word. This syllabus becomes the lens through which every part of the course is viewed. So instead of trying to force instructors to use a method of organization that is less familiar to them - such as a content management system like Blackboard - they use a model that’s instantly familiar.

New updates will be pushed out to students, along with notifications. Teaching assistants and tutors can edit their contact information and office hours within the system, or be given control over parts of the syllabus for a given course. There's a robust system for adding items and sub-items and pushing them to one or more specific sections for a class. Students can get iCalendar feeds that stay up to date with all of their class deadlines, exam dates, and other deliverables, and administrators can access a robust set of reporting tools to help pull together course information for accreditation and other accounting purposes.

In the fall of 2008, the launch version was our priority. We started with an overly complicated version of the software that was difficult and unintuitive. After several months of iterative improvements and consultations with professors, we had a design that met the expectations of our target audiences. We had a Human-Computer Interaction expert conduct a rigorous usability test with course instructors; she came back to us with a report that concluded that while there were some rough edges, people generally loved to use Concourse. Our beta testers shared similar sentiments.

I moved on to other projects in 2009. Since then, Concourse has gone through many more design iterations led by a number of other talented designers. You can try out a demo at the Intellidemia website to experience the product first-hand. The interface has been simplified a tad since 2009, but the fundamentals that I designed still remain. I am happy to see that the Edit Syllabus view I created in the first release is largely unchanged; the interface for the edit sidebar just pops along the side of the virtual syllabus page and visually indicates nested sections. This approach addresses the inherent complexity of nested information inside the syllabus sections without introducing too much confusion.