Aug

21

WebCT: pros and cons

Filed Under Collaboration, Musings 

I’m spending the day taking a class on WebCT, an online “learning community” program. This is software to help you teach courses or collaborate with people who are not in the same room/building/town/province/country as you. It’s a pretty cool program but it has some significant strengths and limitations from what I can see.

  1. If you’re in Manitoba building a learning community for professionals, WebCT is free to use. If you’re using it for other purposes, well, you need to pay for the software and find a way to house it with all the costs that involves. Everything I know suggest that ain’t cheap. You might be better off looking at Moodle software since it’s free and does some pretty similar thing to WebCT. It seems to be pretty easy to find a place to host Moodle, but harder to find a host for WebCT.
  2. WebCT is complex. This workshop is three days all together. We’re trying to understand the basics of this software and then bring other teachers on board in using it. Three days is a long time. Wikis, blogs, and such can be taught in about 10 minutes. I can get other teachers to try those. Can I really get anyone to try something this involved?
  3. WebCT is powerful. You can upload and share tons of pictures, word processor documents, and other files. There’s all kinds of ways of ways to share these files, or to keep them private. There’s tremendous potential there, but, once again, as I look around the room at my fellow seminar participants, they’re having some trouble wrestling with the features that allow you to share. The people in this room are all pretty computer savvy. How well would the average computer phobic teacher do with something like WebCT?
  4. I’d like to see some kids work with this software. This is a useful package, and I can’t help wondering whether our hesitancy with some of its features says more about us as “old” people unable to fully adapt than it says about the actual software itself. We’re digital immigrants, not natives, and that can make all the difference using new software.

Interesting software. I look forward to learning more tomorrow.

Comments

One Response to “WebCT: pros and cons”

  1. DoctorJ on August 21st, 2007 5:05 pm

    WebCT is really non user friendly if you’re building something. It’s fairly simple to use for simple tasks like clicking links and downloading files. The message board component isn’t very user-friendly, though. At our university the way they make it work for non computer gurus is to have a unit that will set everything up for you so that all you have to do is to enter grades.

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