Committee looks at WebCT alternatives
Web Course Tools (WebCT) will cease to be the main course management system operated by the Tech community in the beginning of the 2008 academic year.
WebCT Classroom Edition (CE), the program currently used on campus, will no longer be supported by the parent company, Blackboard Inc.
Two new systems that have the potential to replace WebCT, WebCT Vista 4.0, a product of Blackboard Inc., and Sakai, are being tested by a special committee commissioned by Anderson Smith, vice provost for Undergraduate Studies and Academic Affairs, to assess which product is better for Tech.
According to Jim Foley, committee chair and College of Computing (COC) professor, the committee has been actively considering the matter.
"The committee has been meeting every week since the middle of August to consider differences between Vista and Sakai. In a couple of weeks, we will have a meeting where the focus will be on getting information from the trials," Foley said.
According to Donna Llewellyn, director of the Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning (CETL), a high-gear pilot testing phase will start in the spring semester of 2007. Transitioning into the new product will carry into the end of the fall semester.
"We're looking to see not what students can see six months or one year from now, but what the program allows for innovation. The important question is: what does it allow us to do that we can't do now?" Llewellyn said.
The innovative capabilities of the new product are only part of the parcel of reasoning that is behind the drive for change.
The difference between the two programs is that Vista is a Course Management System that only applies to the classroom and Sakai can be used as a digital home and database for any group whether academic (class/research group) or social (any student organization).
While Tech's contract with WebCT was paid by the Board of Regents (BOR) and a similar method of payment would be used with WebCT Vista if it were chosen, Sakai is an open-source program and has no license fee.
"Vista would be paid for through BOR annually and this gets us the product and support," Llewellyn said.
Sakai operates on a different method of payment. "We pay $10,000 per year for three years and join what's called the Sakai community. It is a group of universities who have chosen to pay this to the foundation. That buys you access to code before it is open-release" Llewellyn said.
This allows Tech to learn more about the product and collaborate with other schools in the Sakai community such as Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
"The cost is for the support for the product. It's for having people at Tech who ensure that the database is up, for showing faculty how to use it, for doing all the kinds of things that we should be doing to support the product," Llewellyn said.
"We want to make the best possible change," Foley said. The new system would help to achieve Tech's long term strategic objective of excellence in education technology use. The new system would have to be securely accessible to students all around the world.
"We also have students in the Savannah campus of Georgia Tech. People in the Global Learning Center also teach courses all over the world," Foley said.
While both Vista and Sakai will have the same basic tools as WebCT CE, the system's permeation in a student's academics will still depend on the professors. "Right now, a minority of courses use WebCT in an interactive way. There are universities where the course management system is part of the culture. We want to get a system that has the potential to become part of the culture," Foley said.
According to Llewellyn, the tools would have to prove themselves. "Tech believes in academic freedom for our faculty so we'll never be in a campus where we mandate that the faculty has to use a tool. My goal is that we have tools available that are so attractive to be using that the faculty wants to use the tools because it facilitates them doing what they want to do," Llewellyn said.
