WebCT Conferences

I apologise for taking so long to enter this update. For some reason Denise wanted her laptop back to fly home, so I didn't have my wireless internet access any more.

The first session was "Enhancing WebCT with Powerlink Partners". Once it got started, I realized this was actually a combination of two sessions I saw earlier, session "J-6" (Digital Content Offerings - Beyond e-Paks) and session "K-5" (Deter Plagiarism and Enhance Learning with Turnitin). So instead of staying around I went to check out the vendor displays again.

The second session, "Migrating Content to WebCT 6 Campus Edition" was much more useful and interesting. This session discussed the tools that WebCT has provided to simplify the transfer of course content from the old system to the new.

The first step is to install the latest service pak for WebCT 4.1 and the content migration utility. This provides new functionality to WebCT 4.1 so it can export data to WebCT 6.

There's two parts to the conversion. The first part is converting the "enterprise data" (user data, enrollments, the old WebCT 4.1 "Global Database"). The second part is to convert the course content. Admins can do either. Course designers can only move the course data.

The enterprise data should not be a problem for us. We'll probably use SSAM to re-populate the new server. We will only need to use the conversion utility for "non-nsid" usernames. There should be a lot less of these to convert because people no longer need test student accounts in WebCT 6.

Transferring the actual course content can be done as a command line batch job by the administrator, as a gui batch job by the administrator, or on a course by course basis using a gui wizard for the course designers. We'll have to examine this in more detail to find the best solution for us. All of these methods exports the course content to an IMS XML file that can be loaded into WebCT 6.

Once the couse is imported, a report is put in the course as a hidden text file. This report lists errors (things that couldn't be converted) as well as changes (things that have been moved or work differently). It is useful both as a log of what to check, and as a training tool for faculty to show them the new changes in WebCT 6.

Course content can be moved, but there is no way to move student work to the new WebCT system. This implies that we may need to keep a skeleton WebCT 4.1 server around for a year after the 4.1 server is "shut down", so we can handle recovery of student data for student appeals.

In summary, I was quite impressed with the conversion functinoality. We should have less problem converting courses to WebCT 6 than we had moving courses to our new "webct2" server from "webct2" during the Banner integration.

In our specific case, we'll need to do the following:

1. Install and test the 6.1 server


2. Integrate the 6.1 server with SSAM and populate the user database so it matches the 4.1 server


3. Identify which "development" and "test" courses should be moved to the new server. We should take this opportunity to weed out any deadwood and only move courses that need to be moved.


4. There is no need to move "active" courses. Those will be created as needed using Banner.


5. Transfer the courses to the new system. The central administrators might choose in most cases to move the courses for the instructors. However, we could just create a blank course shell and let the instructors move the content themselves if they prefer.


6. Remove (or hide) the transferred courss on the old server so that course developers won't be updating the wrong course.

One note about feeds from Banner. Apparantly Banner can only feed one WebCT system at a time. So, if we intend to run both systems in parallel for a year, we'll be able to feed one system directly from SiRIUS. However, we will have to use batch extracts from SiRIUS to populate the class lists in the other system. If we go live with WebCT 6 in May, then likely May we'll do the batch extracts for WebCT6 and leave WebCT 4.1 integrated, then switch that in September so that WebCT 6 gets the live feeds and WebCT 4.1 gets populated with the batch extracts.

For more information, refer to the WebCT 6 upgrade guide for administrators.