Fall 1997
Vol 6 Issue 1

IN THIS ISSUE...

Who's Doing What with Technology

The Man Behind the WAN

webCT @ PC

Who's Doing What at the Colleges

The Next Generation of Ocotillo

Ocotillo College Roundtables

SEE ALSO...
The Forum

Maricopa Center for Learning and Instruction

webCT @ PC
Alan Levine, MCLI

NOTE: The audio version of this interview, taped on September 15, 1997, is available in RealAudio format.

While more "tools" are available to help create web pages, a gap occurs when a few class pages become a complex web-site, when a faculty member wants to incorporate more interactive features (on-line tests, discussion areas, dynamic content), or when there is a desire to track student activity. To fill this gap Phoenix College (PC) is exploring a web management system developed at the University of British Columbia known as "webCT." You can learn more about webCT by visiting the web-site at:

Recently, I visited Billie Hughes and Sandra Wells [photos, 51k] at PC's Technology & Development (T&D) department. This is a new department which is charged with the responsibility of supporting faculty and staff in technology integration. Hughes said that "they were looking for a tool that will allow faculty to put materials on the web for either distance delivery or just for class use."

Only a handful of faculty at PC were individually developing course web pages. Several faculty members created homepages using a template generator program, and the college had already developed a rich informational web-site, but with a shortage of support staff, T&D was looking for a means that would assist faculty as they developed instructional web pages.

Along with a group of faculty attending a conference at Northern Arizona University, Billie and Sandra saw webCT demonstrated and were "impressed with what it could do... everything but make coffee in the morning!" They saw it as something that could meet a wide range of instructional needs.

What is webCT?
Running as a program installed on a web server, webCT manages all aspects of student access to web course pages, while providing faculty with a web interface for creating their materials. Most importantly, Hughes says "it puts control of the content and its management into the hands of the faculty." Also, it allows easy integration of pre-built components such as discussion bulletin boards, chat rooms, person-to-person messaging, and on-line testing. Student activity is tracked and available for faculty to review.

For students, webCT provides a single and consistent interface for course pages and related areas; plus students themselves have access to their own records. The entry point for students is a directory of webCT courses created at PC. After selecting the link to his or her course, a student enters a username and password to connect with the material. A basic course page includes a welcome message with links to the activities that the instructor has chosen for that course.

What Faculty Can Do With webCT
An instructor enters the same course area with a special password, and they see the same view as the students. However, the lower part of the screen contains a second web frame with a series of buttons which provide the options for editing course materials. The webCT designer tools provide a variety of page templates, graphics and button icons, and options for customizing the layout of the page (you can also use your own graphics). All of the steps for arranging the course main page are done by the options in the webCT designer tools.

Built in to webCT are features faculty can easily add as links from their main course page course pages:

• Chat Room - provides synchronous communication between students and faculty
• Bulletin Board - provides asynchronous communication; "threaded" discussions like newsgroups or the Electronic Forum
• Messaging - a web interface for e-mail between class members and faculty
• On-line tests - provides immediate feedback and scoring or it can be graded individually by faculty
• Course calendar - lists important dates for assignments
• Glossary -- provides links from anywhere in a webCT course page

In webCT, an instructor can create "path" pages for the course-specific content. Each of these pages has a consistent upper frame (like a navigation bar) that contains links to the different built-in webCT functions (e.g. chat, e-mail, bulletin board). The lower part of the page contains any web page created by the faculty or an external web-site that the instructor has chosen as a reference site. Therefore, the web-sites or web pages used in a course are "framed" with navigational tools that keeps a students in the context of the content for that course.

Behind the Scenes
WebCT is not a general tool for creating HTML documents. Instructors can develop their course content as HTML documents, or incorporate material they have created with systems such as Adobe PageMill or Microsoft FrontPage. These files can be uploaded directly from the webCT interface, which offers a series of tools for re-organizing the files on the server. Thus, an instructor can upload course material without going through a centralized staff and without dealing with Internet file transfers.

One of the more significant features of webCT is its ability to track student activity. An instructor can access a spreadsheet view of their students, check the exact time and the amount of time they have used the system, and see which assignments they have completed. WebCT can also generate charts and graphs from this data, and perform tasks such as selecting the total number of students who scored within a specified grade range and automatically sends them a customized e-mail message with their score.

Helping Faculty Get Up to Speed
A number of PC faculty are experimenting with webCT this semester. Sandra Wells reports that "it takes some time to get used to, but it is also about as non-threatening as we could find." To help faculty get started, T&D has planned several workshops that will use tutorials created by the webCT developers (and delivered in webCT format). Hughes hopes that participants can, after the first session, "at least put up a syllabus and connect to a chat room and bulletin board." Wells and Hughes are also developing a series of training modules in webCT format.

The Potential of webCT
In addition to the ability to easily incorporate interactively into web pages, the PC faculty that observed webCT were very impressed with the ability to do detailed student tracking. Plus, webCT gives them immediate information on the way course materials are being used- beyond counting the number of "hits" per page. Instructors can see the average amount of time that was spent on a particular page or the number of posts that were made to a specific bulletin board from a particular page.

"While webCT does not have the pedagogy built in, " says Hughes, " it does have the tools that allow our faculty to input, connect, and manage the content they want to use- and it allows faculty to control their materials." Billie is very excited about the potential of webCT for faculty and students. "We're scared! We don't know what's going to happen, but we are going to provide support for faculty to get started." There are great hopes that webCT will be able to free faculty from nitty-gritty technical details of running a web course page and allow them to concentrate more on the potential of the web as an interactive learning environment.