Q. Dr Paul - I am a Rector and I want to convert my campus to Web-based teaching. So I’ve set up a committee of my academics to advise me. That was a big mistake! Some of my professors advocate various kinds of Web-conferencing (quoting some of your articles as justification); others want multimedia Web solutions; others say that streaming media is the answer and are filming themselves giving PowerPoint presentations (they quote your articles as well!); another clique say that all "real" academics should be able to create Web pages themselves. I asked my Computing Director and he was not very much help - but he did say that in other industry sectors there was a big move towards integrated solutions such as Lotus Notes. Are there any integrated solutions to help me re-engineer my campus? Bemused of Berlin
A. Dear Bemused - There are some integrated solutions available. Indeed, some of the existing systems integrators known to your Computing Director are moving towards this market, led by Lotus Notes but with Oracle in hot pursuit. (What about Microsoft? Biding its time, and building up its overall capabilities, I suspect, until it is clear that there is a viable market in the education sector.)
However, in my view, at this stage the commercial integrated solutions derived from other sectors have several flaws. They are not sufficiently general nor sufficiently oriented to educational needs to be a total solution; yet at the same time they tend to be rather unwieldy and costly for educational sites. This is why somewhat more focused and "low footprint" solutions such as FirstClass and RealAudio have become popular with educational re-engineers. They don’t do the full job (and don’t claim to); but they do often give one a 70% solution.
So what about the integrated solutions emerging from the educational arena? It is fair to say that it is rather early days for these, but they are coming along nicely. There is one industrial-strength commercial solution and two very interesting academic developments moving towards commercial exploitation (though at different rates).
The three systems are:
TopClass, from WBTSystems of Dublin,
WebCT, from the University of British Columbia, and
Virtual-U, from Simon Fraser University.
TopClass used to be called WEST and the company used to be called "Web Educational Support Tools". But the product and company has now had a major re-launch with a nice Web site - see: http://www.wbtsystems.com.
TopClass is designed to manage the delivery and support of training and education over the Internet - and corporate or campus Intranets - using the World-Wide Web. In addition to providing support and collaboration tools for users such as built-in messaging and conferencing areas, it also manages all students and tutors on the server as well as the course material assigned to them.
WBTSystems recently announced a major agreement with SUNY - State University of New York. SUNY has over 400,000 students across 64 campuses and they have site-licensed TopClass to roll out over the next 2-3 years. The press release contains a key quote from the head of the evaluation team - which should make all Rectors stop and think. "We need to get traditional face-to-face courses on-line in as short a period of time as possible in order to provide universal access to the content anywhere anytime and to do it in a simple but relatively seamless manner". He continues: "We found TopClass to be the tool that best facilitates the creation and management of sophisticated Web-based learning environments."
In Dr Paul’s view SUNY will be a pretty good reference site for TopClass if it all comes to pass.
WBTSystems has set up a US office in Silicon Valley and is cleverly positioning itself as a US-oriented company. It may be regrettable but it is the standard way for a European company to succeed in the US market. It also seems clear that WBTSystems will expect the training market to deliver many of its initial sales - but I suspect only because companies are still rather more bottom-line oriented than universities. Dr Paul feels that TopClass will be attractive to universities too.
There is an online demonstration available to all at: http://www.wbtsystems.com/demo/index.html.
Virtual-U describes itself as "a server-based networked learning environment specifically customised for customised design, delivery, and enhancement of education and training courses delivered over the World Wide Web (WWW), using new paradigm pedagogies based on collaborative learning and knowledge building". One can easily tell from this that academics are behind it.
The system is said to be ideal for post-secondary institutions, K-12 schools, and businesses/corporations which are in need of a flexible, user-friendly, and integrated framework for delivering online learning.
The Virtual-U technology has been developed by Drs. Linda Harasim and Tom Calvert of Simon Fraser University. Dr Harasim, who is well known in computer conferencing circles, describes it as "based on more than a decade of research in network learning and human-computer interaction".
The Virtual-U system was officially launched about a year ago. Now around 15 educational and business organisations across Canada are doing online, Web-based courses, using Virtual-U.
A demo of Virtual-U is at: http://virtual-u.cs.sfu.ca/VLEI_demo/index.html - but this does not allow access to real courses. There is also a lack of good publicly-available documentation of the system, but I feel that to some extent this is because they are now close to commercial exploitation of the system.
Our last system seems to be less near the commercial market, yet looks fully-functional with many industrial-strength features.
WebCT was developed at the University of British Columbia - known in "ed tech" circles as the home base of Tony Bates. It is "a tool that facilitates the creation of sophisticated World Wide Web-based educational environments". WebCT also uses WWW browsers as the interface for the course-building environment.
WebCT can be used to create entire on-line courses, or to simply publish materials that supplement existing courses (one should not sneeze at this hybrid approach - often a good place to start, if not to finish). See: http://homebrew.cs.ubc.ca/webct/. The name "homebrew" gives some clue to its provenance.
WebCT has the advantage over the other systems described here of having very extensive documentation publicly available - see: http://homebrew.cs.ubc.ca/webct/intro/ for the entry page to this. In keeping with the university tradition its educational uses have also been described in several academic papers - see: http://homebrew.cs.ubc.ca/webct/papers/.
Aside from facilitating the organisation of course material on the web, WebCT also provides a wide variety of tools and features that can be added to a course.
The software is late beta software but described as "very stable". It is being used to develop over 100 courses at the University of British Columbia, and many more courses at universities in other parts of the world.
In keeping with the scholarly atmosphere that pertains at UBC, there appears to be no marketing plan in place yet. Dr Paul suspects that they will soon realise that they owe it to themselves and the community to exploit WebCT more widely - that may make the development less academic and friendly, but is the only route to widespread adoption of the product.
There is a demonstration of WebCT at: http://homebrew.cs.ubc.ca/webct/try/ - and in a nice touch, you can even try it out as a course designer!
You might well ask why there is no integrated system arising from the educational conferencing fraternity. In my view this is because although there are many agencies developing WWW-based conferencing, Dr Paul feels that there is no future for them against the major commercial general-purpose email developers such as Microsoft, Netscape, SoftArc and IBM/Lotus.