WebCT Conferences

Thomson is a product that provides textbooks and enhanced online web content to go with the textbook. They have a system called "iLrn" which contains course contents, assignments, etc. This is organized using their "study plan" tool. students take a pre-test, are told what they need to study, and then get a post test at the end). Grades from the post test are fed back into WebCT.

Participants log into a WebCT course shell (ePak) supplied by Thompson. These can be tailored and adapted by the instructor. The WebCT shell doesn't actually have the content in it. Instead, it provides links that take users directly to the iLrn product.

Their powerlinks allow WebCT users to log into iLrn through single signon. So students don't have to re-authenticate. Designers have "instructor" access in iLrn, students have student access. The powerlink also supports return of marks to the WebCT gradebook. Assignments done in iLrn can report their grades back to the WebCT gradebook.

The iLrn look is intentionally different from WebCT so students know when they are outside of WebCT.

Quiz questions from the textbook can be imported into WebCT quiz bank. iLrn questions cannot be added to (yet) or modified. However, they also have a lot of question types (over 50) that cannot be supported in WebCT. For example, mathematical, physics, etc.

This does work in WebCT 4.1 as well as Vista, WebCT 6, etc.

Technically installation involves installing the powerlink, and then adding the ePak to WebCT.