Criteria for Selecting Courseware

Online Teaching/Learning

Instructors who intend to use courseware as a teaching tool (as opposed to an online source of documents, references, and/or assessment) will benefit from WebCT's extensive content customization and participation monitoring features. Sttudent Tracking allows instructors to view when a student first and most recently accessed the course and the total "hits" by each student including the number of bulletin board articles read and postings made. Instructors can also see graphs comparing a student's visits to each page of content and the percent of the total content the student has seen and when. Instructors can perform similar analysis on groups of students or the entire class, to identify trends or cause/effect relationships between student behavior and performance.

CourseInfo tracks by pages rather than by students. Instructors can turn on tracking for individual content pages, although by default only major section homepages are tracked. Instructors can see the number of his per page organized by user, date, day of week, and time of day. There is no integrated feedback on individual student or class online behavior or overall usage of the materials.

WebCT allows for conditional content release so that instructors can manage the pace of the course or ensure that students are prepared for new topics before beginning them. This feature allows the online environment to be adapted dynamically based on students' activity, and content can be customized for each student. CourseInfo does not support customized (conditional) content presentation.

Both products provide support for online group work. In CourseInfo, each group (groups are created by the instructor) has its own set of tools for e-mail, chat, bulletin board, and file sharing. However, there is no way for groups to publish their work on the Web. WebCT groups have tools for e-mail, file sharing, and Web page creation. WebCT allows instructors to create multiple bulletin boards in a course, so a group bulletin board would also be possible. So, your preference on this criteria would be based on whether your main goal was for student groups to communicate in real time (CourseInfo) or publish content (WebCT).

Both products also include bulletin boards. The current version of WebCT is much more robust, including search, show read/unread, move and delete messages, and view in threaded or unthreaded format. Most importantly, students can select and "compile" postings to create their own archive/study tool. CourseInfo's provides only one bulletin board per course. Its only options are for viewing in expanded or collapsed mode. New bulletin board features are due in the August version of CourseInfo.

Finally, one other area of online teaching/learning to consider is student study tools. In addition to the bulletin board compiler, WebCT has a range of tools including self tests, study guides, glossary, annotations (ie, taking notes on course Web page content), bookmark, and email compiler (which works the same way as the bulletin board compiler does). CourseInfo does not include any student study tools.

Time Available to Manage Course

CourseInfo's adminstration and content development tools are centralized and extremely simple to use. Every page contains by default all appropriate navigation, headers (banners), and footers. Content is immediately available to students (although content in development can be hidden until the instructor chooses to reveal it). Instructors with limited time can assign the status of "course builder", "grader", "teachers assistant" or "instructor" to another user account, which allows them to delegate various instructional and developmental tasks without assistance from an administrative person.

WebCT's course development interface is unconventional and inconsistent, requiring some time to learn. Tools for various development functions appear on pages where they're needed, but it is sometimes difficult to navigate to those pages in the absence of a centralized instructor administration area. Many functions require multiple steps, and some familiarity with navigation in frames is very helpful. Instructors design their course in real time, but need to "update the student view" for their changes to be available to students. Although there is no way for instructors to delegate the task of course building short of sharing their password (and full privileges), they can assign the status of "grader" to other user accounts, and those individuals can take on the task of assessment.

Both products allow complete courses to be exported and imported, and student accounts to be uploaded from a file. WebCT also includes a QuickStart wizard which allows an instructor to build a course in about 20 minutes.

Importance of Online Assessment

WebCT has a sophisticated quiz module that allows instructors to duplicate just about any type of question scheme they may be using offline, including the standard multiple-choice (including more than one correct answer), short answer, true false, matching, and essay questions. The questions can be embellished with HTML code and embedded images. Correct answers can be weighted, and incorrect answers can be negatively weighted. Instructors can include feedback for each possible answer to a question (as opposed to just a single response each for correct and incorrect). Quizzes can have time limits, and instructors can see from students' scores whether they exceeded the time limit. Students also can be given the choice of taking the quiz more than one time, and if so, whether each grade should be recorded. In situations where more than one grade is recorded, the instructor can decide which grade to use based on highest score, first score, last, average, etc.

WebCT also speeds the process of quiz building by maintaining all questions in a central database. The database is organized by instructor-created categories for ease of management and can be queried to select questions according to specific characteristics. Questions can be uploaded from a file into this database, removing the need to create individual questions manually.

In addition to quiz mode, WebCT also provides "self tests" which the student can take on their own to measure their progress. The self tests then provide some direction for the student when studying content.

CourseInfo's quiz module is limited. It supports multiple-choice, true-false, fill in the blank, and essay questions. Instructors can include feedback, but only one message for correct and one for incorrect (in multiple-choice questions). Although documentation indicates HTML can be embedded, when I tested this feature it did not work. However, images can be embedded in both the question and the answer(s). The instructor can provide point value for each question but scoring is all-or-nothing (no way to weight different answers). There are no timed quizzes or graded multiple-try quizzes. One nice feature is that a new quiz can be "announced" on the course home page as soon as the instructor makes it available.

In both products, quizzes are linked from the Course Contents/Documents pages so students find them easily. Both allow students to check their grades online, but WebCT also allows instructors to specify if students can see their grade in comparison to the class as a whole.