As you may know, the Advisory Committee on Information Technology has been looking at course management systems (programs such as WebCT, Blackboard, and so forth) for St. Thomas. We want to make sure any program we adopt fits the ways we teach here, and is one that faculty will find useful. We're using this short questionnaire to try to get a sense of what the faculty here might be interested in. If you have any questions about this process, contact a member of the ACIT -- Peter Dielissen, Michael Houlihan, Russell Hunt, Patrick Malcolmson, or Lawrence Durling. A paper version of this survey will also be circulated, if you'd prefer to submit it that way.
Listed below are some things course management packages help faculty do. If you would mark each of these as one of the following it would be very helpful as we evaluate such programs for adoption here at St. Thomas:
Student access to online records. (Potentially, students could then be given password protected access to the online records, or designated portions of them, and so could check their results online)
Easy ability for the instructor to post course documents (syllabi, schedules, assignments) to a Web site so that students can access them from any computer, any time
Easy ability to import/export data from a spreadsheet (Quattro Pro or Excel, especially) so that you could use the spreadsheet for keeping course records and easily publish data to a course Web site or other function
Potential to put tests and examinations on line to be taken in a lab or at home (One such program describes this this way: "Instructors can create automatically scored true/false, multiple choice, multiple answer, ordering, fill-in-the-blank, image map (click on the correct part of the image), matching questions. Questions can contain images, video, other media files. The system can randomize the questions in a test. Instructors can create feedback messages. Instructors can create personal, and system wide test banks and the system can use these test banks to create tests for students. Instructors can set dates and times for when students can access tests. The system provides test analysis data.")
Ability to offer potential students information about courses in advance of registration
Electronic submission of assignments
Online assignment marking and return
Help with course creation and design, relating to the presentation of subject matter online
Ease in developing online tests or instructional devices
Access to materials co-ordinated with published textbooks
Available existing libraries of teaching materials
Lists: At the most basic level, automatic creation of distribution lists so that you could send email to all the students enrolled in a given class
Lists: An option could allow everyone to post to the list
Lists: Another option could allow easy creation of sub-groups in a class: if, for example you had divided a class into four groups working on four different projects, you could easily create four different mailing lists. Then you could send specific advice on a given project just to the group working on that project, or provide for that group to have easy online consultation.
Easy hosting of a class bulletin board discussion forum (asynchronous). This would allow students to exchange ideas more readily and might encourage collaborative learning situations
Easy hosting of online chat rooms, where the communication occurs instantly (synchronous)
Easy creation of individual student web pages. Students can view each other's work. You can easily monitor progress on a given project