WebCT news at SFU

In WebCT, one of the things that you can do to customize your course container (just a little) is to modify the header (or footer) of the main page (the Course Content Home) if you want to use official terminology.

Keeping in mind that whatever you add to the header will “push down” any icons you have on the main page, what could you add there? Would you wish to be informative or provocative? Keep the information administrative or learning-related? Add an image or text?

Here are some of the ideas that I came up with:

• your office hours (and a reminder for what they’re for)
• an approaching due date
• the weeks theme (encourage them to consider how the readings, class content and any assessments all connect)
• a question for students to ponder while they do the readings or homework. Ideally, it would be a broad question requiring analysis or synthesis of their learning
• a link to a new resource: a journal article, a you tube video, a blog posting or a photograph that ties in with that weeks concerns
• if you wanted to get fancy with formatting, you could add an RSS feed, guaranteeing a fresh item each time
• a general comment or observation on the last class you had with them (it might cover a common misconception, something that surprised you, or an ah-ha moment).

I like the idea of the homepage header being a revolving insight into the state of the classroom learning. Who knows what you’ll get from this.

The assignment drop-box in WebCT assumes that one person will be doing all of the grading. You can’t sort the assignments, for example.

On the WebCT user forums, this thread asks that very question. About half-way down, someone describes how to use the group tool and assignment tool to sort assignments according to tutorial.

Alternatively, you can download all the assignments at once, and then “throw out” the ones that you are not responsible for grading. That is a simple manual way of managing the drop-box. This will not work as well for extremely large classes, but is viable for classes with less than 60 students. You will still have to browse for individual users when uploading the assessments. Use the “assigned to” column title to sort alphabetically.