Universities sometimes seem a little leery of offering instructional designers much in the way of server access—even with full authentication. It takes a deep level of trust to allow people to publish out into the world from a university’s IP addresses. I totally understand that. There is room for caution, balanced against professional needs and free speech rights.

In a sense, one can argue that instructional designers can mimic sites on a main computer using a browser and the preview functions of various authoring tools. They can get a real sense of how the digital learning objects will behave.

Technological Behaviors in the Wild

They can actually publish something to a learning / course management system, but then, those who are not on campus will have a hard time accessing the digital contents—particularly in situations of critique and feedback. For clients, they should be able to easily get to materials for analysis and feedback. They should be able to see how an object (or a preliminary mock-up) will behave in the wild.

Hosting into Perpetuity

I think the challenge in my situation came about when I was working on a project and was hoping to fly it under radar in order to have the microsite appear as part of a publication. This mean a need for hosting a site into perpetuity. That is sort of a tall order in terms of responsibilities for objects. And this is actually not a total forever kind of thing but a practical perpetuity.

What I’m hearing though is that such objects cannot be hosted into perpetuity unless they’re part of a funded project or a direct core mission of the university. In a sense, a university does host a lot into perpetuity—digital learning objects and journal articles, online courses, department websites, and others. The university also stores a lot of digital materials off of servers.

A New Agreement

A recent quandary over the hosting of materials into perpetuity brought out a flirtation with the commercial side. A very professional sales rep had been asking me to hold a national webinar on any issue of my choice showing my use of their software, and I had declined twice—over a multi-year period. I was not really trying to put myself into any negotiating position. That is usually a recipe for having people drop you from consideration, period. Well, he took this instead as a time to make a deal—which was lucky for me.

He offered me server space into perpetuity if I would go ahead and do a presentation. Easy. Easy. I wholly agreed with that scenario. We have a deal, and I’m able to protect a project which will make my university look good as well as the (highly respected) maker of this technology.

On campus, we are trying to find server space that might be a little more permanent instead of one that falls to the vicissitudes of whether an administrator wants to leave an open-source site open or not, with mid-stream project changes. Without actual server space, it’s totally understandable that one uses what one has at hand—even if it is a little unkosher and even if it leaves an online link under some risk.