WebCT and online grade submission

Walt Milligan, 10/30/2006

WebCT 4.1 is the course management system currently in use at Michigan Tech. It is a relatively old product that many faculty do not enjoy using. Further, the user support for WebCT was lost in the last round of budget cuts at the university.

A robust course management system is cricital to our educational mission at Michigan Tech. These programs enhance the educational experience of traditional courses and are absolutely essential to online learning courses. Therefore, the current situation is unacceptable.

WebCT was recently purchased by its major competitor, BlackBoard. This has led to a great degree of uncertainty regarding the upgrade path. BlackBoard has announced that it will merge the best features of WebCT and BlackBoard, to come out with a new product, some time in the future. Unfortunately, "some time in the future" is very murky, and we can't wait around for that. BlackBoard also announced that they will continue to support WebCT indefinitely.

There is a new version of WebCT available, version 6.1. It is supposed to be much easier to use than 4.1, and has some added functionality including the ability to do e-portfolios. It is also based on a relational database (e.g. Oracle) and so it will interact very well with Banner. BlackBoard is also a relational database product, as is the main open source product called Sakai that was developed by Michigan, Indiana, Stanford and a few others. (Note: Open source = free.)

Based on all these developments, it appears that we have 3 choices:

  • Upgrade to WebCT 6.1.
  • Migrate to BlackBoard.
  • Migrate to Sakai

Note that staying with WebCT 4.1 is not an option. There are a couple of other open-source programs out there with promise that can be investigated, notably Moodle.

The Sakai Project (and Moodle) are not "out of the box" solutions. In Ann Arbor, for example, a student or faculty member does not see Sakai; he or she sees CTools, built on Sakai. This requires hiring development staff. This may be the eventual solution that we end up using, but it is not going to happen in the short term. We can either put our money in staff or software, but the timing is not right for Sakai right now.

These deliberations are not being made in a vacuum on the 5th floor - there have been many, many meetings and discussions with various working groups and individuals on campus and off.

After coming to these conclusions, I arranged a meeting with Karen Gage, a Vice President of BlackBoard; Keith Giltner, our WebCT representative; Patrick Belivacqua, who would be our BlackBoard rep if we switched. We met in Dallas on October 10. I asked them to recommend a course of action based on our needs. They recommended unanimously that we upgrade to WebCT 6.1, for ease of implementation and importing of our current course content into a new system. This upgrade will also ease our transition to the merged product when it comes out, if we decide to adopt it.

Therefore, based on this and input from a number of key people involved in WebCT on campus, we have decided to upgrade to WebCT 6.1 over the next 6-8 months, with a planned complete transition for Fall 2007. I will be leading the way, teaching MY3400 in the studio and using WebCT 6.1 in the Spring Semester. I will be happy to accept any other volunteers for a Spring semester beta-test of WebCT 6.1

We also need to find a way to fund WebCT user support for faculty.

A related issue is online grade submission. I believe that we may be the only university in Michigan still using bubble sheets for grade submission. This is embarrassing and is going to end.

Both WebCT 6.1 and BlackBoard facilitate electronic grade submission through their pre-existing Gradebooks. The products talk well to Banner. A possible solution to online grade submission is to leverage the WebCT product and require online submission for all courses. There are a number of advantages to this, including the fact that Banner can export accurate class lists to WebCT (faculty don't have to type the names by hand) and the Gradebook has spreadsheet features. Another option that we are exploring is to develop a custom, web-based interface to Banner for grade submission. Comments are appreciated.

Update, October 31

I played with WebCT 6.1 for 2 hours today. It is absolutely fabulous. Easy to use with a great gradebook.