Recommendation

Advisory Committee on Information Technology
Recommendation
April 2004

Electronic Course Management Tools at St. Thomas

The Advisory Committee on Information Technology has spent much of the current academic year investigating this question: should St. Thomas invest in a university-wide course management program, and, if so, which one?

This is a complex question, and one with potentially significant consequences for the shape of education at the university -- for the ways faculty teach and the ways in which teaching is supported. Unlike the adoption of, for instance, a bibliography package or statistical analysis program, which might be used by some people and be completely irrelevant to others, a course management package, in order to be effective, should be one which literally everyone on campus would use, rather like an e-mail program or the fundamental network structure we all employ.

It is important to recognize that at the present time only a small minority of faculty use, or have expressed interest in using, the resources of the computer network as central elements of their teaching. Further it is clear that the primary concern of the Advisory Committee should not be to change that, but to make sure that all the faculty have effective, practical access to the most useful tools we can provide. Whether one chooses to use a given tool or not, however, is a professional decision which must be left to the individual faculty member.

At the same time, it's apparent that there are almost no faculty who do not use information technology -- in the form, currently, of WebAdvisor and DATATEL -- more peripherally, to gain access to class lists, to submit marks to the Registrar, and as a central medium of communication with other faculty, the administration, and students.

For this reason, it is very important that any course management program be immediately and intuitively accessible for the latter purposes -- in fact, be capable of becoming the effectively transparent medium by which these tasks are accomplished -- while at the same time offering those who are already using information technology as central elements in their teaching, and those who in the normal course of growth and change may become interested in doing so, tools and opportunities which support rather than hinder their current activities.

In practice, we are faced -- as we were when St. Thomas originally instituted its computer network -- with three choices.

We can do nothing, allowing things to develop as they have been doing
We can increase support for the initiatives currently underway and, in essence, develop our own "home-grown" suite of programs supporting the various teaching initiatives
We can acquire an "off-the-shelf" package designed to support teaching and course management more generally

Making this choice has been a complicated procedure, involving a survey of faculty views on the issue within St. Thomas, another among subscribers to email distribution lists focused on teaching and teaching support and a series of demonstrations and consultations with representatives of the most likely commercial packages, and with users and administrators of such packages.

As a result of this consultation, the committee has come to the view that St. Thomas should adopt an "off-the-shelf" package. There are a number of reasons for this conclusion. Among the most important are the following.

Standing pat

Doing nothing is not a tenable option, as a majority of the faculty members most actively involved in developing information technology based teaching strategies find it increasingly difficult to use the software currently available, and support for those programs is becoming increasingly time-consuming, in part because of the continual change in available options and the evolution of standard programs.

It is difficult or impossible for those with little technical experience to integrate these strategies into their curricula. If we agree that such tools should be made readily available to all faculty, it is important here to recognize that the particular strategies and techniques being developed are in practice not accessible to most -- who are, for example, not likely to adopt an online Web-based discussion tool if it involves learning how to configure an entire new software package, weighing options for configuration and learning about network structure, HTML coding, etc. Further, it is virtually impossible to document and build in continuing support for such practices, as they are of necessity conducted and modified on an ongoing, ad hoc basis. Programs are "orphaned" and abandoned, or change in fundamental ways with upgrades, and basic strategies need to be learned all over again.

Growing our own

These arguments also apply, perhaps even more fatally, to a suggestion that an "in-house" collection of programs be adopted and developed. Experience with such initiatives suggests that a central issue is that such assemblages cannot be sufficiently documented with the resources available so that personnel changes wouldn't be crippling.

Buying off the shelf

For these reasons, among others, the Committee concludes that a university-wide course management program needs to be adopted. Here, there are again choices:

We could adopt an "open-source" university-based management system such as Coursework, currently under development by a consortium of universities including Stanford and the University of Michigan
We could adopt a commercial product such as Blackboard or WebCT (currently the two industry leaders)

Here the choice is more complex, but the central considerations have to do with the availability of accessible support from the source. While there is much to be said for "open-source" programs, much of it is applicable primarily to institutions with more ambitious and heavily-resourced Information Technology support infrastructures. Like many other relatively small institutions, St. Thomas is limited in the resources it can devote to supporting and developing information technology. It's not only worth considering that the commercial products offer their own startup and ongoing support, but also that because of their widespread "installed base" there are many other institutions and colleagues using the same program.

The Committee therefore concludes that a commercial course management system is the best choice for St. Thomas. Of the available alternatives, it seems clear that the two industry leaders -- Blackboard and WebCT -- are the most appropriate choices.

Deciding between them is yet another complex matter, and on this issue the Committee believes the question is open. It is agreed by representatives of both that the list of features provided by each is and will remain comparable, and in the view of the Committee the list of features is of secondary importance, since (a) very few of them beyond the basics are likely to be used in the immediate future by many faculty and (b) the list will have changed out of recognition by the time faculty begin to adopt them.

What is of most importance, the Committee believes, is the potential of the program to become the "default" method by which faculty, students and administration access basic information about courses such as numbers and titles, descriptive material, room assignments, class lists, marks, and so forth. Adoption of such a program should mean that from the moment it is in place, faculty would -- by default, directly from the university Web page -- access class lists, post course descriptions and syllabi (this would be the venue for submitting such descriptions to department chairs and the Vice President Academic), and submit marks.

Whether faculty adopted further elements of the package would be entirely up to them; they would, however, not be required to learn anything beyond what is already needed under the current system to retrieve class lists and submit marks.

We believe either Blackboard or WebCT can be installed in this way.

The final and most important consideration in our recommendation has to do with support, and it is that WebCT has been adopted at UNB, Mount Allison, Dalhousie, and a number of other neighbouring institutions, where support staff has become accustomed to dealing with it and where colleagues have begun using it. It seems clear that this gives WebCT a distinct advantage.

Subject to the following conditions, then:

The system must be a "turnkey" installation: that is, it be installed and brought up to running status entirely by the vendor -- though, obviously, a local implementation team will need to be organized to participate in the long-term process of adapting the software to the local conditions;
The system must be able to mediate all requests for course information, by students, faculty and administration;
While faculty and students would see this program replace WebAdvisor as the default method for obtaining course information, the process should be transparent and require no or minimal new skills;
The vendor should undertake to provide support for technical problems;
Internal IT support should be increased to provide for the increase in demands entailed by this new package; and
Support should be maintained to enable faculty currently using in-house and individual strategies to make a reasonable transition to the new system and, where the new system is unable to provide the services necessary, to support continuation of those services;

the Advisory Committee on Information Technology recommends that WebCT be adopted at St. Thomas, and that steps be undertaken to have it in place well in advance of the beginning of the 2004-5 academic year.