For writing classes in general, these systems, as well as weblogs, are particularly useful for expanding the rhetorical situation of classroom writing by moving student writing onto the public Internet. They allow students to gain experience in writing effectively for the web without having to know how to use static HTML-based website creation and maintenance applications such as HTML editors, FTP/SSH file transfer, etc. Because the software provides common Internet tools (forums, blogs, wikis, polls, etc.), students can compare their experience using the class website with other Internet discourse mediums.

In the technical communication classes I have taught, familiarity gained with the class CMS site has been useful for providing experience with CMS's that could be useful in their professional careers, while also providing a context for discussing professional uses of content management and knowledge management. Students have gained enough experience with the CMS through using the class website to move on to end of the semester projects in which they use/create a class project website using the CMS (see Surviving Purdue). I've had information technology students download and experiment with Drupal outside of class. And through Purdue's Open Source Development and Documentation Project, students have gone on to write extensive user documentation for using the application.

Since these applications are designed for constructing public Internet sites, they also provide features that better facilitate community formation and interaction than can be found in proprietary LMS's. For instance, dynamic sidebar blocks appear on every page listing the most recent comments, blogs, or forums. Student content can thus be featured throughout the site instead of buried many clicks deep in forum threads. User tracking features can be available to the entire class, allowing everyone to see what and when others have been posting; Blackboard provides user tracking as the teacher's administration panopticon. And a common feature on most CMS's, the Who's Online block, provides for me one of the most poignant differences between these systems and using Blackboard or WebCT. When responding online to student work outside of class using Blackboard, I always felt solitary, alone. The Who's Online block enabled on my class sites provides a list of all users currently logged in who have recently viewed a page. Now when I review student work, I'm often not the only one online; indeed, students, too, have commented their surprise to "see" me on the website late at night, making it clear to me that for all of us, the Who's Online block and other dynamic sidebar blocks were facilitating a feeling of community not possible in proprietary LMS's.

These features are only a few of the many components that provide extra flexibility for teachers to configure their class site, making them less dependent on the decisions of the software designers. For example,

Indeed, because these applications are publicly developed and open to community criticism, they have been refined for usability, unlike Blackboard and WebCT; frames are never used, and there are no WebCT-style forum pop-up windows. Juniors and seniors in my writing classes at Purdue who have used WebCT previously have often commented that--once they become familiar with our class site--they found the CMS much easier to use and required less time of them to complete their online assignments. Similarly, I've talked with other teachers who agree that these systems are also more efficient for the teacher to use.