We've got a lot of info sessions planned for our designers as part of the move from WebCT CE 4.1 to WebCT CE 6.1. The first session will be for our faculty designers and heavy users; those who look after a large number of courses and/or other designers (say 10-50 sites rather than the more usual 1-5).
Part of preparing for this session is having a look at what other institutions who've made the same switch have written in the doco they've made available online. I'm making notes of things to follow up & check out myself, and of things to mention.
Some to Mention, some to Investigate further
* The Quizzes/Surveys tool is now known as Assessments and now includes Self-Tests.
Check how each difffers in this version (quiz, survey, self-test) and whether any changes from 4. Also check randomisation (w/in questions, w/in answers) for 6.
* Some course functions are exclusive to a tab! For example… the Gradebook can only be accessed via the Teach tab.
* Who’s Online: The new Who’s Online tool enables course participants to see fellow classmates who are logged into the course and chat with them. Instructors have the option of hiding their online status if they do not wish for students to chat with them.
* Group Sign-Up Sheets: Students can use the Group Sign-Up tool to sign up for a class group.
Yes yes!! Electronic tute allocation at last!
* Link annotation feature: Instructors can annotate links (or icons) on course pages. This is an effective way to give students a better sense of what is available through a particular link (or icon).
Could be great for annotated reading lists as recommended- cf Gelnn Sakeld's Pub Health annonated reading lists. We could use this with CORS. I wonder if you can easily import entire lists of links + comments? It would be great if you had articles in CORS and could import the article refs + links directly from what the Library sends.
* Selective Release function: Most types of content or activities in WebCT can now be selectively released to students.
Also, perhaps far more importantly, you can now release based on more-- and cumulative criteria! Date, group, results on vairious assignments, etc.
* Graded Discussions: Instructors can now grade discussion board postings from within the Discussion tool.
* Assignment tool: Several new features have been integrated into the Assignment tool, which include the ability to create group assignments, return assignments for review & submission, and the ability to publish a completed assignment viewable by other students in the course.
Publish Assignments sounds a bit crazy to me (ok, wrong word but still). Probably need to check how this can be locked down-- I imagine one would usually not want to allow release until ALL other students had submitted? Maybe only useful for group assignments which differ a lot between groups, for example tute papers which are typically on a different topic for each group.
* Student Tracking: Student tracking has been greatly improved to include new tracking information such as number of mail messages read, calendar entries viewed, and pages viewed in Folders (formerly known as Organizer Pages).
This is a lot better than 4.1, which only showed views of items in Content Modules and not Organiser pages. This led some groupds (eg Pub Health) to use CMs almost exclusively. One hassle with CMs if that they couldn't have items like Quizzes, Assignments, links etc in them (except via the Action Menu but that was a poor option in my opinion; far too hidden, and as a very tiny link when one may be pointing to a very important assessment item!) Which brings me to:
* Learning Modules - a better Content Module!
LMs replace CMs, which had a number of shortcomings, some of which are listed in the point above.
LMs can now have all types of items in (as far as I've seen so far)-- the lack of which was one of my major bugbears in v4! So you can now have, for example, pdfs, web pages, URLs, docs & spreadsheets, audio and movie items, images (I think-- shoudl test this one). links to individual quizzes and assignments (hurray!!!), and so on. ROCK. This is finally working more like it should! NeridaJ phrased it well yesterday, saying it was easier to group by topic than by type than in previous versions. Much better pedagogy.
* New Quiz Question Types: Four new question types have been added to WebCT version 6, including jumbled sentence and fill-in-the-blank question types.
Meh. I'm sure some people will like this; guess it's worth mentioning, but it sounds far more K-12 level than tertiary to me.
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CREDITS: Most of these notes made from various pieces of doco from Sacramento State U. Nice work guys!
