WebCT: Will the Future of Online Education be User-friendly?
Tama Leaver
English, Communication and Cultural Studies, University of Western
Australia
The impetus for this paper comes from two related events: the first
is my initial contact with the online education ‘courseware’ package
or Managed Learning Environment (MLE) called Web Course Tools (commonly
abbreviated as WebCT); and the other is the University of Western
Australia’s (UWA’s) purchase of a campus-wide site license for WebCT
and the resulting expectation that all e-learning at UWA will be
standardised via WebCT mediated delivery. There are a number of
reasons for the decision to manage all course content using WebCT
and the IT policy section of the UWA website illuminates some of
these:
The future of online learning at UWA is towards [sic] an enterprise-wide
approach and away from a “cottage industry” approach, whilst retaining
and harnessing the considerable skills and enthusiasm demonstrated
in the relatively high level of use of online materials achieved
to date.
The Learning Management System WebCT has become a centrally supported
platform for all staff to use, in order to encourage greater consistency,
portability and durability of online learning materials. (University
of Western Australia, 2003)
Interpreting this statement and the extended policy from which
it is drawn, the reasoning behind the campus-wide WebCT purchase
can be broken down into economic, managemental and pedagogical motivations.
Economically, the centralisation of all e-delivery using one platform
means that the one price paid supposedly covers the entire university’s
needs. Extending this economic rationale, the smaller scale or so-called
“cottage industry” e-learning packages – such as The Forum
(http://forum.uwa.edu.au)
and Jellyfish (http://fish.mech.uwa.edu.au)
– are thus viewed as superfluous and they are no longer developed,
funded or supported. Managementally, centralisation means that
all staff training can be standardised and that all support services
for the MLE can be handled centrally rather than needing discipline
specific or faculty level WebCT support. In more specific administration
terms, one platform also allows Student Administration automatically
to grant and deny access to specific courses on the basis of student
enrolment. WebCT is also an “enterprise-wide” platform in that it
both covers all areas of the university and also is thought to have
all the tools necessary for the needs of all teaching and
learning areas. Finally, pedagogically, the argument is made that
one portal and platform will be easier for students and staff to
access and learn rather than potentially having to use several different
e-learning interfaces. While economic, managemental and pedagogical
reasons are all related, reading the UWA IT Policy does suggest
that pedagogy is being driven by economic rationale rather than
the other way around.
Before continuing to analyse some of the specific features of
WebCT, I want to emphasise that this paper contains my initial
reaction to WebCT; while I have had the opportunity to participate
in a course delivered via WebCT and have been given an overview
of the design interface for course construction, I have not extensively
developed course material using the MLE. The observations and concerns
raised in this paper are tentative and subject to change as the
situation at UWA necessitates deeper engagement with the platform.
However, in this paper I hope to utilise the naiveté of my engagement
with WebCT to ask some broader questions about the politics of the
package that for some more experienced users may get obscured by
the processes and investment of using and designing courses with
WebCT.
Initial Comparisons
At this point I want to contextualise my engagement with WebCT
and make explicit that I am examining WebCT after previously using
an alternative e-learning delivery system called The Forum. The
Forum was designed and run by the Multimedia Centre at the University
of Western Australia and has been the delivery system for the majority
of units in the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences.
The Forum is certainly not as large a package as WebCT, and its
more streamlined design is restricted to information and content
delivery. After initially logging in, students are presented with
four main options. The first is the ‘Notice Board’ which opens
by default and contains any additional important notices or messages
from the unit coordinator. The second option is ‘Unit Work’, which
contains copies of the course outlines, any additional handouts,
as well as anything else the course coordinator wishes to post,
such as supplementary web pages. The third option is ‘Recordings’
which gives students access to digital recordings of the lectures
using the students’ choice of either the Realplayer or QuickTime
media plug-in programs. And the last main section is the ‘Bulletin
Board’ which allows access to a Bulletin Board system which may
or may not be utilised formally in the course.
For those already familiar with WebCT, two major differences will
be apparent: firstly, that The Forum is a very small suite limited
to delivering content; and secondly, that The Forum does
not have any assessment tools such as the option to design quizzes
or to facilitate student submission of assessment in electronic
form.
Size: Is Bigger Really Better?
Ostensibly, the size and complexity of a fully-fledged courseware
package such as WebCT appears self-justified since the size correlates
with the amount of different functions that package can perform.
For courses which are mainly taught online and which make use of
the package to deliver content, facilitate discussion through chat
or bulletin board type environments and which utilise assessment
tools, WebCT probably appears (and may very well be) the ideal choice.
However, what about units which use online delivery only as a supplement
to traditional techniques? There are, for example, a considerable
number of units in the Discipline of English, Communication and
Cultural Studies at UWA which limit their online presence to the
delivery of course handouts and lectures in electronic form as a
secondary resource in case students are unable to make scheduled
lecture times. For these units, WebCT may be less appealing for
a number of reasons. For one, the course coordinator will need
to familiarise themselves with the content creation tools in order
to use WebCT even if they only wish to put a tiny amount of information
online. This difficulty is often exacerbated because many educational
institutions insist that staff must take a course on WebCT before
they can use it for their units.
While a sound idea in principle, these courses regularly run
upwards of four hours and the length can often prevent already busy
staff from becoming WebCT qualified. Alternatively, if unit coordinators
do spend considerable amounts of time learning to use WebCT, often
the temptation is to try and justify the time by creating extra
electronic content and “try out” the package, even if that extra
content is, in all fairness, of very little benefit to students.
Similarly, becoming WebCT qualified rather than more general training
on e-learning principles gives the impression that everything that
educators need to know about online education is addressed by understanding
WebCT. The platform is, in effect, driving pedagogy. Moreover,
the idea that a single American platform is sufficient for the specific
needs of an Australian university points to the increasingly monopolistic
and US-centred deployment of educational software. By contrast,
a more critical approach would see teaching methodology scrutinized
and evaluated with the potentials uses of MLEs in mind, and only
after careful consideration would specific platforms be investigated.
However, the current trends in the Australian tertiary sector of
increasing staff workloads and larger classroom sizes combined with
more administrative responsibilities mean that even finding time
to attend a basic WebCT course is optimistic for many educators.
From a student perspective, WebCT’s size can also have a downside.
When students initially log in to WebCT they are presented with
a ‘myWebCT’ page which is basically their personalised doorway to
the courseware package. This page is very full, containing links
to courses in which the student is enrolled, a campus-wide notice
board, several (non-customisable) links to WebCT’s American homepage,
bookmarks which can be altered by the student, institutionally defined
bookmarks, help options and so forth. From a design perspective,
this first page suffers from “information overload” since the number
of options can be quite overwhelming. However, once students are
comfortable with the variety of choices, there are other issues.
The ability to create and manage bookmarks – that is, links
to other websites – can be very distracting as with other customisation
options. The underlying architecture of the page is similar to
that of customisable homepages elsewhere on the Internet, such as
the interface for the commercial Yahoo!™ web portal. While not
a concern in itself, having an e-learning package homepage that
is specifically designed to encourage users to utilise WebCT for
personal reasons, such as storing bookmarks and maintaining a personal
calendar, does raise the question whether there should be some sort
of boundary between educational and personal use online. Also,
going back to the example of courses which use e-learning tools
in a fairly limited way, students run the risk of spending as much
time tinkering with the options of WebCT as they do actually looking
at course content.
Design Tools: Inward or Outward Facing?
I want to turn now to look at the way course content is written
in and transferred onto the WebCT platform. WebCT comes complete
with course creation tools which are accessible only to the course
coordinator and which allow differing degrees of design and flexibility.
The WebCT corporate “white paper” advertises that with these tools,
‘professors needn’t become Web programmers’ (WebCT, 2002B) to create
online content. These tools are similar to ‘What You See Is What
You Get’ or WYSIWYG online development programs which simplify web
page construction, meaning users do not have to learn the underlying
hypertext markup language (HTML). Obviously, not having to learn
HTML is an advantage in terms of time. However, most WYSIWYG programs
acknowledge that it is still important for designers to have the
choice of examining the code they are producing, which can usually
be displayed at the click of a button (the Macromedia design package
Dreamweaver is an excellent example of the dual view, in
that it can display both ‘code’ and ‘design’ windows simultaneously).
This option allows designers to track, scrutinise and over time
comprehend how HTML (or, indeed, XML or whichever language designers
are utilising) works. These tools are thus outward facing
in that their design allows users to become fluent in the basic
language of the Internet and thus gain an understanding and skills
which can be used across a wide range of different programs. In
contrast, WebCT’s course construction tools have no such flexibility.
WebCT’s tools are thus inward facing in that learning to
use these tools is only of use when designing within the WebCT environment.
While inward facing tools may appear a fairly minor gripe, I contend
that it is an indicative of the corporate mentality which drives
the WebCT package; these tools do not teach generic skills, but
rather WebCT skills and thus serve to shore up WebCT’s continued
use since users would have to expend time learning new skills if
they were to use any other program. WebCT’s tools are, in effect,
driven by a philosophy of corporate monopolism.
Surveillance: Who Watches the Students?
Another of WebCT’s troubling features, and the one most often commented
on in critical literature, is the imbedded surveillance of students
(Merrick and Willson, 2001; Brent, 2001; Mullen, 2001; Land and
Bayne, 2002). As Helen Merrick and Michele Willson point out, WebCT
tracks students use in a number of ways:
The number of times that they visit content pages are noted,
the date and time of their last access is noted, as are the number
of postings that they have made and/or the breakdown of these
into original and follow-on posts [as well as] … when they last
accessed a page, and what pages they have accessed. (2001: 247-8)
The large quantity of surveillance data recorded against each
student is easily accessible to course coordinators in the form
of tables and graphs generated internally by WebCT. Even if this
information is not directly accessed for each student, a disclaimer
is usually issued to students making them aware of the possibility.
These types of surveillance correlate with Michel Foucault’s concept
of panoptic surveillance wherein individuals act as if they were
always being surveyed due to the possibility that they might be
surveyed at any time (Foucault, 1979). Even if course coordinators
choose never to examine information gathered by WebCT, the possibility
that they could do so may have the same effect. Mark Mullen has
extended this concept and argues that the surveillance possibilities
of MLEs such as WebCT and the major competitor Blackboard, actually
illuminate a ‘pedagogy of suspicion’ which emphasises the need to
watch and punish students rather than encouraging students’ personal
responsibility for learning (2001). Indeed, if such information
is regularly available, will course coordinators be able to choose
not to access it? In the era of increasing litigation in
which we live, there is often an expectation that so-called responsible
use of information means that if available it must be accessed
and if needs be, acted upon. If course coordinators become aware
that students never spend more than five minutes on readings, will
they be required to chastise the student? Will tutors have to make
sure students make a minimum number of posts in any given bulletin
board topic? These and other questions raised by WebCT’s imbedded
surveillance could have serious ramifications for the activities
and responsibilities of educators. Although, it should be noted,
these concerns seem to construct a fairly monolithic top-down reading
of WebCT. Laterally thinking students who are aware of the surveillance
in WebCT may be canny enough to subvert this system, for example,
by logging onto pages and leaving them open while doing other things,
thus appearing to have read their course content for long periods
of time.
Corporate Education?
As mentioned earlier, there is considerable evidence of the corporate
mentality driving the design and operation of WebCT. Students are
presented with customisable homepages to encourage repeated and
often personal use, and the associated course construction tools
are useful and develop skills exclusive to the WebCT framework.
Of more serious concern, however, is the development of WebCT’s
‘e-Packs’. E-Packs are pre-packaged WebCT-based courses which according
to WebCT’s homepage come ‘including video animations, sample syllabi,
lecture notes, quiz and test banks, and glossaries, all combined
with the functionality of WebCT’s e-learning solution’ (WebCT, 2002A).
While academic colleagues often share course material with one another,
the idea of buying a complete ready-made course is of a different
magnitude altogether. Indeed, the combination of WebCT’s dominance
of the courseware market and the increasing development of e-Packs
has the potential to impact heavily on new course construction.
Given the increasing workload of many educators, the temptation
to purchase and run an e-Pack based course rather than develop a
new course from scratch and transfer it onto WebCT, could prove
too great. And despite WebCT’s emphasis on the flexibility and
customisation options of e-Packs, working from the same material
would inevitably homogenise tertiary teaching and learning. While
the common use of e-Pack courses may appear a rather far-fetched
or paranoid scenario, the potential is there and should at least
be examined. More to the point, if e-Packs do get utilised in some
universities and these institutions manage, in effect, to construct
courses in a quarter of the time it would normally take, then the
pressure on others to follow suit would no doubt increase. The combination
of modular pre-packaged courses with the economic rationalism and
bottom line managementalism could potentially homogenise course
content in ways unheard of before large-scale courseware packages;
e-learning may become simply rebranded and packaged homogeneous
e-delivery.
Some Thoughts for the Future
In concluding this exploratory paper, I want quickly to summarise
the features of WebCT which I find of most concern:
1. WebCT’s bulk can be a burden for courses only utilising partial
online delivery.
2. The customisation options from the student side may encourage
procrastination and WebCT being used in ways which routinely deflect
students away from core teaching and learning objectives.
3. The course construction tools are inwardly and exclusively
WebCT-oriented and do not teach outward facing generic skills.
4. The imbedded surveillance options can substantially infringe
on student privacy.
5. E-Packs and other modular options may potentially homogenise
tertiary teaching and learning.
I should qualify that these concerns focus on the negative side
of WebCT and while the program has its problems, it can be very
useful if used in a reflexive way, keeping its potential flaws in
mind. Certainly e-learning has the potential to enhance teaching
and learning experiences, as long as tackled in a critical manner.
However, the development of better options should not simply be
restricted to making the most of WebCT. As the growing trend in
Australian universities of using the open source Linux operating
system instead of Microsoft’s Windows demonstrates, there are alternatives
being developed and they may prove superior to even the most dominant
products. If the money spent on licenses and support for the American
WebCT package in Australian universities was channelled into the
continued development and improvement of existing local programs
then a better option might be found right here at home.
Author's Biography
Tama Leaver is currently researching a doctoral thesis at the University
of Western Australia entitled ‘Artificialities: From Artificial
Intelligence to Artificial People – Representations and Constructions
of Identity and Embodiment in Contemporary Speculative Texts’.
He also teaches cultural studies, gender studies and literary theory.
Recent publications include an analysis of William Gibson’s second
trilogy, and an article on gender, the Borg and Star Trek: Voyager.
When not thinking up ridiculously long titles, his research interests
include cybercultural studies, contemporary cinema and science fiction.
References
Brent, Doug. ‘Web Courseware Authoring Packages: Some Troubled
Thoughts’, Inkshed: Newsletter of the Canadian Association for
the Study of Language and Learning 18.3 (2001),
http://www.stthomasu.ca/inkshed/nlett101/brent.htm
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison,
trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979).
Land, R. and Bayne, S. ‘Screen or Monitor? Surveillance and Disciplinary
Power in Online Learning Environments’ (2002),
http://jimmy.qmuc.ac.uk/usr/sbayne/surveillancepaper.htm
Merrick, Helen and Willson, Michele. ‘All Wired Up: Reflections
on Teaching and Learning Online’, in Hugh Brown, et al. (eds.)
Politics of a Digital Present: An Inventory of Australian Net
Culture, Criticism and Theory (Melbourne: Fibreculture Publications,
2001).
Mullen, Mark. ‘“If You're Not Mark Mullen, Click Here”: Web-Based
Courseware and the Pedagogy of Suspicion’, Workplace 5.1
(2001),
http://www.louisville.edu/journal/workplace/issue5p1/mullen.html
University of Western Australia, ‘Draft Revised IT Strategic Plan’
(2003),
http://www.uwa.edu.au/it/strategy/revisedstrategy/teachlearn
WebCT. ‘E-Packs for Instructors’, WebCT.com (2002a),
http://www.webct.com/content/viewpage?name=content_why_use_epacks
WebCT. ‘Leveraging Technology to Transform the Educational Experience’,
WebCT.com (2002b),
http://www.webct.com/service/ViewContent?contentID=4464759
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