WebCT news at SFU

It’s a new semester, and you might wish to remove old courses from your WebCT class list. These instructions are the same for instructors, TAs and students:

When you login to WebCT, click on the small pencil icon next to the “Course List” header. You will be taken to a screen titled “Edit Course List.” From there you can hide links to inactive courses if you like, or reorder your Course List. When you are done, simply click on the MyWebCT tab in the upper left corner again. This will not impact anyones access to the course. It simply hides it from your view.

To reorder the course list, select the courses you’d like to move by clicking in the small box next to the course name (checking the selection box), and then clicking on the box with yellow bars (under the header Move) to where you’d like your course to appear in the list.

The University of Carleton has a teaching and learning blog, with some postings on WebCT use.

This postings discusses the use of educational technology as a means of acheiving (or at least approaching) a paperless classroom.  Instructors at the University of Carleton and at SFU post classroom materials online: syllabus, lecture outlines, links to readings and weblinks and assignment descriptions and guidelines online. This gives the student just one place to look for these materials (instead of coming through past emails, or stacks of paper). Online quizzes can also be a means of implementing regular assessment (graded or self-testing) and feedback into the course without contending with mountains of paperwork.

Another posting is more general, talking about creating learning opportunites using technology.  This is an opportunity to look at three different courses who use the WebCT online environment to:

• create long term resources
• reducing trivial emailed students from students
• fostering an online learning community
• create a common look and feel for the course
• using images on the course content home to reinforce key ideas and concepts from the course
• importing other tools (Google Calendar or Picasa photo management) into WebCT, to combine those tools ease of use with a central online location for the course materials and community.

We are planning on having some SFU faculty demonstrate their use of WebCT in the new year. Keep an eye on the LIDC calendar of events for dates and times.

Currently, all regularly scheduled courses that are over four semesters old (courses from Spring 2007 and Winter 2006) have been hidden. This will help your MyWebCT homepage load quicker.

You can modify the look of your MyWebCT page, and hide any inactive courses. For details, click here: http://wiki.sfu.ca/webct/index.php/Navigate_and_customize   You can backup an old course using the instructions found here: https://wiki.sfu.ca/webct/index.php/Request#Creating_and_using_Backups

To access courses that are hidden (Spring 2007 and earlier), please contact the SFU WebCT administrators at webct@sfu.ca

This is going to be part one of a three part series: the planning, delivering and wrapping up a web-supported course.

With some simple planning, you can reduce the basic administration associated with the classroom and connect with students. Alternative texts, video or audio can provide depth or context to student learning. Extending the classroom discussion to an online environment or reinforce concepts with regular assessments and feedback. How might this save you time in basic tasks, help you connect with students, recognize diverse ways of teaching and learning, and increase student learning?

part one: planning and setup 

To start, get some inspiration by looking at other web-based courses (http://www.webct.com/exemplary), attending a workshop or asking colleagues.

Advance planning will help you set your objectives, manage expectations and prioritize your time. What do you want your students take away from this course? What materials, approach and assessments can help you reach these objectives? Incorporate ideas that you’ve seen in other web-supported courses or that your colleagues have told you about. Which administrative tasks take up time in the classroom? How can a web-supported course help?

Write a list of the content, links, resources, and media that you currently use or would like to use for a course. Use this content to reinforce concepts, use different learning and teaching styles or to provide alternative resources and viewpoints. Review the tools available - is there anything new you’d like to try? Take the content, the communications and the assessment and put it in a logical order.

Write a welcome message using the announcements tool or the discussion forum to state your expectations, and what students can expect from you in this environment. Describe to your students the learning path this course will take and how the combination of the web-supported and face to face classrooms will support their learning.

When you are ready, request an online course section using the form at http://webct.sfu.ca∞

Your course container is yours to customize. Start by adding the tools you want to use. Add your syllabus and any course material - you can hide it or set release date to manage student access. Using the assessments described in the syllabus, setup the gradebook, and give your “demo student” some grades. Use the student view tab to see how the content appears, which grade columns are visible and which tools are available. Reinforce the prerequisites needed for your course by creating a low-stakes quiz to bring students up to speed, and help connect your course with the prerequisites.

Students are added to your web-supported course section automatically at SFU, as they register in SIMS. By default, students will be able to access the online materials in WebCT on the first day of classes.

Create some basic, but customized buttons for WebCT using this button maker resource.

It is very basic - you can only change the colour and the text of the button, but it’s all yours. I had to choose very short words to fit!

 Iconfinder will let you search for icons. There is not a directory that you can browse, so you’ll just have to input specific words until you find icons you like. Searching for objects (”fish”) seemed to work better than searching for concepts (”communications”).

I find the selection of icons that WebCT provides to be limiting. You can either find new icons or create your own icons.

1. find icons

Sets on the University of Edinburgh site (a variety of icons, some of them from older versions of WebCT)

City College of San Francisco (a crisp icon set, downloadable in a variety of colours).

When downloading icons from other locations, please be sure to give appropriate acknowledgement to the copyright owner.

2. resize existing photos or images

If you have photographs on your computer that would make suitable visual icons, you can resize them easily using this online software. Your icons should be 70 to 100 pixels in height and or width.

Try Resizr to modify your own images.

I have access to many courses because of work. At the beginning of every semester, I edit my course list. I hide courses from previous semesters, and I rearrage the courses so that the ones I access most often are up top.

To do this: The header for your course list has the image of a small pencil on the right side. Click on that pencil, and you can choose to hide/show or reorder your courses.

It is relatively easy to create HTML pages within WebCT. Create HTML pages (web pages) loads content faster for students and elimintates the need for downloading. There are simply fewer variables if an HTML page (instead of a word document) is used to deliver content.

Unfortunately, the webpages created from within WebCT do not have any page margins, and so text aligns with the edge of the page, and so right up against the course tools menu.

To add margins to a page, you can simply cut and paste the following text at the top of your HTML page (make sure you have selected the option to “use HTML”). Add your own content below this code.

body {
margin-left: 32px;
width: 80%;
line-height: 150%;
}
li {
font-family: verdana, arial, sans-serif;
}

I sometimes like to add images to WebCT, or use a photo of my own as an icon. It’s always been so much trouble though to open Photoshop (which I’m not very comfortable with) just to resize a photo. In my travels through other blogs, I found this nifty online application called ResizR that allows me to quickly upload a photo, resize it, and then save the new, smaller image on my desktop.

It’s a simple, quick application that does exactly what I need it to do, and nothing more.

This is fixed as of May 2008.

Course titles are truncated in the course content map, making it pretty messy. We are not the only ones to have noticed this.
This has been reported to WebCT (September 2006).

Update (October 25th). WebCT is aware of this bug and is being worked on for the next WebCT upgrade release