Sharing Student Research on Google Sites with Creative Commons

One of the great things about a project-based course is that students can bring fresh, creative angles to the standard topics in a field. Unfortunately, their contributions often don’t have a lifespan beyond the semester or a good way to reach a broader audience. Google recently revamped its aging Google Sites service, and I found it to offer an effective solution for this challenge in my course this semester, especially in combination with the rest of Google’s cloud services. If you’re interested in sharing student projects on a public-facing site, I also found some licensing tools from Creative Commons nicely address some important concerns about credit and reuse.

Engaging Students

As a philosopher teaching in ASU’s School of Life Sciences, I’m always looking for creative ways to engage students with philosophy as an activity – something we can do together as a group -- rather than a bunch of theories disconnected from what they’re studying. I’ve been teaching an upper-level undergrad/grad seminar on Philosophy of Biology and Medicine for several years now, and it attracts a great mix of students from all sorts of programs and past experience with philosophy. I’ve always had a soft spot for wikis as a flexible platform for people to contribute knowledge about shared topics. What I tried out this semester is basically a new way to stitch together some existing tools to run a free* class wiki that can build across semesters and publish content to a public-facing website in a controlled way (*based on ASU’s university subscriptions). You could use the approach I took for any student projects that work as text or multimedia on a website, though. 

Desired Features

I’ve tried some other wiki platforms or tools before, with less than great experiences, so I’ve accumulated a few key desired features along the way, which are maybe relevant for your context, too:

• Free
• Version history/control 
• Option to publish to public web, plus control over publishing process 
• Simultaneous online editing of page content
• Basic formatting tools and ability to incorporate multimedia if desired
• Easy to incorporate multiple revisions with instructor and peer review feedback 

The new version of Google Sites met these needs pretty well. I had read about the old Google Sites getting out of date, and I wasn’t really sure how it was different from Google+, which shut down a few years ago. The new Google Sites has a straightforward point-and-click interface, with some simple customizable design templates. The tools for individual page layouts also allow you to insert text boxes, content from other sites, and some options such as an image carousel or multiple columns images with captions. You can also easily add and organize multiple pages to create a navigation bar with drop down menus for sub-pages. After making edits, you can review them and then publish to the web (with an ASU URL) with the click of a button.

Project Management

For collaborative student projects, having access to a page’s version history is invaluable for grading. Google Sites does offer version tracking, but only at the level of the whole website, which in my case would be confusing since I had multiple student groups working in parallel. Instead, I inserted a new Google Doc for each page and had students work on the Google Doc. (This also had the extra bonus of allowing them to use the chat function in the document editor.) This option doesn’t make a pretty website at first, but it’s simple enough to copy-paste it into standard html text once the projects are complete. I also made a new Google Team Drive for all the files to help organize them into one place and keep a clear separation with other files not related to the course in my personal ASU storage. 

Permissions for Publishing

Once you have some student projects that are ready to publish, it’s important to be clear about ownership and credit for their intellectual property. In order to publish their work online, you should receive permission from each student. I had students complete a Google Form as their last assignment for the semester. Having them approve use under a Creative Commons license allows you to share and modify the work freely as long as you provide appropriate credit. They’ve created a handy website that introduces you to how the licenses work and explains the differences between the alternative flavors. For my purposes, it would quickly get too complicated to let students choose between different licensing options, especially if students from the same groups made different choices. So I went with the most basic and open option, the CC BY license, which “lets others distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation… Recommended for maximum dissemination and use of licensed materials.” I did give students the option in my Google form of having their name included as an author on the page or to be credited more anonymously as a student of the Spring 2020 course.

I had a great experience with the course and all these tools this semester, and I’m now working on editing the content to get it online this summer. Hopefully I’ll have some new ideas and updates to share soon! 

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Beckett Sterner studies the social epistemology of pluralism: what knowledge do we need to get things done together while differing in fundamental ways? He teaches undergrad and grad courses in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University, including Philosophy of Biology and Medicine, Evolution, and Big Data in Context.