S. Worthen | Weblog

When I started teaching online using WebCT, it was on a brand-new server with a brand-new version of WebCT which was as new to the rest of the faculty guinea pigs as it was to me. Everyone had problems with it. Thus, my students were sympathetic with my own problems, only part of which were a consequence of the software's bugginess. The rest were because I was new to teaching entire courses online. (I'd run informal workshops online before that, but not using teaching software.)

By the end of the semester, however, I was comfortable with the environment. Sure, it was full of problems, full of bugs, but I'd learned to work around the worst of them. Yes, I had experienced the decimal point fiasco*, but at least WebCT 6 had electronic grading sheets, a feature of which I was exceedingly fond. In the end, it really was too buggy overall, and the university decided to give up on WebCT 6 in favor of the already well-established and long-in-use WebCT 4. This switch meant stability, and, for most, familiarity; except, of course, I'd only taught on WebCT 6 before, not its predecessor. It was going to be another new teaching environment, only this time, I was likely to be the only new user of it.

Now I've had several weeks of working with WebCT 4 - and it's not so bad really. My WebCT experience has been all about learning to work around the software package's limitations anyways, and there's a whole lot to be said in favor of stability and speed.

( Compare and contrast... )

* After a spring break software upgrade, WebCT lost track of all the points which students had earned after the decimal point. While each was small, several different sets of post-decimal point credits add up to several points overall, none of which should have gone missing in the first place, and all of which then had to be manually reinstated.