WebCT news at SFU

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.

I found this great blog that a director of an educational technology centre is writing. His blog is what I intend this blog to be - a source of information on changes, work-arounds, and other comments.

It’s often helpful to see how others have used new technologies. If you don’t have a sense of what a software can do, then it’s hard to make choices and prioritize your resources. Here’s a few locations that demonstrate good practices in WebCT:

Coventry University has some very specific examples of how WebCT is used in innovative ways in the classroom, and has written up two in more detail.

The University of Manchester has some detailed and specific descriptions of WebCT use in different courses.

University did a survey of what students wanted to see in their WebCT courses. The results are very similar to the survey that SFU did of students in 2005.

I find it useful to see how other approach similar objectives or challenges. Even if it’s nothing radically different from what you are already doing, it’s comforting to know that others have taken the same approach. I’m using these examples, the questions that we receive from SFU staff and more to develop a set of instructional scenarios, to help connect the various tools in WebCT with divergent objectives and available resources. Knowing how it interconnects I hope will help people make that leap to incorporating more sophisticated - or streamlined methods in their own web-supported teaching environments.

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”).