WebCT: UBC World-Wide-Web Course Tool

An Environment for Building Web-Based Courses

	Murray W. Goldberg	Sasan Salari
University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

Motivation

• Developed web-based course 1-2 years ago
• Used as stand-alone course or supplementary material
• Comprehensive educational environment:
  • Notes
  • Assignments
  • Interactive simulations & Exercises
  • Student self-evaluation & Timed Quiz delivery
  • BB & chat facilities
  • Navigation Mechanisms
  • Page annotation mechanism & Much more ...
• Others wanted to do same
• Therefore, we developed WebCT

What Is WebCT?

• An environment for authoring and delivering educational material
• Uses WWW for both authoring and delivery
• Simple, familiar interface
• Not an HTML editor

WebCT Course Basics

• Home page (design, attributes, view)
• Page sequences & hierarchies (design, view)
• Uniform page layout (design, attributes, view)
• Access controlled (design)
• A set of tools that can be incorporated into any page

WebCT Course Tools

• Bulletin Board (view)
• Chat facility
• E-mail
• Searchable image archive
• Student presentation areas
• Student self-evaluation (design, view)
• Timed quiz delivery

WebCT Course Tools - Cont'd

• Course glossary (design, view)
• Automatic index generation
• Content search
• External references (design, view)
• Page annotation
• Reference counter (design)
• Generic tool

Project Status

• Mostly done - currently working on last few tools, installation scripts and server ports
• Will be available by mid-late summer
• Have funding to put 10 courses on web using WebCT at UBC

Thank You ...

• Questions? Please send E-mail to goldberg@cs.ubc.ca