WebCT Conferences

Their Environment

• Using Banner, but using batch imports, not transaction processing. So they can massage the XML before importing it into CE6.
• Using luminis, but only using CPAS for single signon to myWebCT. They do not use the Luminis course tools to SSO to WebCT because they didn't like that it bypassed the "MyWebCT" page.
• They do not load all their courses into WebCT.

The Tools

They will be posting the source for these tools on DEVnet. They built three tools:

• Supersection creation. Lets instructors do their own crosslisting. Queries Banner to see what courses they have access to and what their crosslist status is. Gives them a menu to let them select courses available to crosslist. They select the courses, and this gets passed to a script that writes the appropriate XML and uses SIAPI to do the crosslisting.
• Course Activation. This allows the instructors to hide courses from students in myWebCT. They do this by messing with the course dates. Their method won't work when integrated with Luminis like us, so not useful for our case. They are trying to emulate the ability in WebCT 4 to mark students "active" and "inactive", which hides the course in their myWebCT screen. Apparantly WebCT 6 only allows you to mark students "deny access" or not, there is no separate "active/inactive" setting.
• Content Transfer. This automates transfer of course content between sections. May be useful for us. They are looking forward to Vista 4 / CE6 where users can say what class they are copying courses from when they first log in, but that doesn't help if the wrong instructor logs in who doesn't have access to last year's courses, etc. We need better procedures around that.

Other Notes

They say that "siapi" creates a new java instance every time it is called, which is why it can be quite slow to start.

I'm not certain there is much there we can use in the U of S implementation. But it is worth looking at.