Wednesday 20 May 2009

What is WebCT like these days?

Since the migration of WebCT to the new Blackboard Managed hostings which I blogged about previously I have heard significantly less complaints about WebCT. They say no news is good news so I assumed this to be the case. However, today someone mentioned that there were still concerns with the system and I was hoping to get some feedback..

So what is WebCT like right now??

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Shocking-

You still cannot press the back button! how simple can that be?!?

Also it doesn't like browsers other than IE. and IE is crap.

Anonymous said...

i haven't really noticed anything different other than it no longer crashes on you, so you dont have to worry about using it off-peak (which is good) -

the other little quirks all seem to remain, like when you donwload something it takes you back to the home page and then you have to do it all again

Nick Peetrie said...

It isn't any faster - however it does seem to more reliable for day to day use. In saying that, it went down for the last major essay deadline date at the end of the second term.

Simply that isn't good enough - the University and therefore blackboard has ample warning when the system load will be higher - they set the deadlines.

Students were then not given sufficient warning of the new submission deadline for turnitin, once the issue had been fixed.

Additionally the use of webct from varies by lecturer and department to far to high a degree. It cannot be relied upon as an e-learning tool.

There has been discussion of moving submission requirements to no longer include a paper copy of the essay - for sole electronic submission - this suggestion has been made for many good reasons - reducing print costs for students and our use of paper at university.

However it is clear at the moment that webct would not be able to handle such a proposition, it is not fast enough, reliable enough or ultilised by the university enough.