WebCT news at SFU

I was talking to someone about the assignment tool the other day who didn’t understand why assignments were downloaded the way they were.

All I could do was explain the steps required according to how the tool was designed. We lease this software from a company called Blackboard.  If you have ideas that you’d like implemented (like drag and drop file management?) or design changes that would make your users experience better, then you should tell them! They have a suggestion drop-box that anyone can contribute to. It’s a big bit of software, so changes won’t occur overnight, but the more suggestions they get, the more likely the software will meet your needs.

If you are a student, you can use the link to Ask Dr.C on the right side of the student support page.  If you are faculty, teaching staff or a TA, you also have a link to Ask Cr. C on the instructors and designers support page.

The recent move to Daylight Savings Time (DST) has resulted in a slight timing inconsistency in some cases in WebCT.

Any time-stamped activity created between March 11th to April 6th will be 1 hour behind.

Here are a few examples.

1. If an assignment has a due date of March 24 at 2pm, and a student logs in at on March 24th at 1:55pm and submits the assignment, in WebCT it will be time stamped for 12:55pm.
2. Any discussion postings made between March 11th and April 6th will be time-stamped one hour prior. So the posting that I made at 1:30pm today was time-stamped in the discussion area as 12:30pm.
3. All calendar entries that you have created should be correct, because calendar entries are manually created by you, not time-stamped by the software.

These time-stamp irregularities will only occur until April 6th (when the clocks used to change). After much discussion, we think we have diagnosed the problem and the repercussions. There is a patch, but that would change all due dates in WebCT, so it was decided that this communications would cause the least amount of disruption.

WebCT/Blackboard has a suggestion page, and these suggestions occasionally make it into future iterations of the product. It’s productive way of expressing frustrations and limitations. The more people that they get suggestions from, the more likely they are to be integrated.

I’ve decided to start documenting my suggestions here - I hope that it may encourage others to make new suggestions, the same suggestions.

So, today’s suggestion was about social software, and enabling students to interact with content:

“I like the student notes and bookmarks function in the learning modules as it gives students a chance to interact with the content a bit. I would like for these additions to be more dynamic. Why not allow students to “tag” pages (much like we tag photographs in the online photosharing site www.flickr.com), and to share notes and bookmarks. This would engage the students more, and make the content more responsive to students. “