See her website at http://www.electronicportfolios.org/ for more information.

The types of things that go into an ePortfolio are exactly the types of things that you want to find about your long dead ancestors when researching your family history. Facts like diplomas they had, marriage and divorce dates, etc. Stories like a series of loveletters, scrapbooks, postcard collections, etc. These are the kinds of things that our decendants will want to see in our ePortfolios.

The current state of ePortfolios has several problems:

• Portfolios currently live in silos. We have a potfolio for work, another one for hobbies, another one for education. It is very difficult to move information between portfolios. What we need is one portfolio system that keeps all the relevant artifacts, then we can build different kinds of stories around those artifacts.
• Current ePortfolios are temporary. You have an ePortfolio of your course work while in University, but as soon as you graduate it is deleted. What we really need is a permanent ePortfolio system that continues on long after you are dead. The ePortfolio starts with your birth certificate and baby book, and ends with your obituary, and stays around for people ten generations from now to see and research. Someplace safe from a fire or flood that can destroy priceless pictures, letters, and other memories.

Some people think that the curent electronic age is creating a hole in history. There will be no family photo albums to cherish through the ages because pictures (and now films) are stored online. There will be no loveletters to review at your 60th wedding anniversary because those emails will have been deleted long ago in a disk crash. Future generations won't be able to see the notes hastily written on postcards that people sent you to add to your postcard collection because now people just instant message other people on the phone.

Some useful books:

• "The World is Flat" - Friedman, 2006
• "A Whole New Mind" - Daniel Pink, 2004
• As We May Think - Vannevar Bush
• OurMedia.Org - digital archive for life

One of the most interesting quotes was written by Vannevar Bush in the article "As We May Think" in 1945.

Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and to coin one at random, ``memex'' will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.

He was describing a personal microfilm reader. But this can apply equally well to the computer, and to ePortfolios.

UWO is integrated with the Peoplesoft Student Information System. They load studeints into WebCT using a batch process that runs twice a day. They are using Vista 3, so have full access to the community manager (admin hierarchies) and learning objects manager (templates). CE6 doesn't have these features unless we pay extra for them.

WebCT with the community manager allows administrators at the group, course, and section levels. (WebCT 6 without this does not allow the group level). For example, the group could be "College of Law",. course is "Law 100", and section is "Law 100 section 01". Students can only log into the section levels.

Their Administration Structure

UWO set up group designers, enrollment managers, and template managers at the "group" level, so that college support staff can manage these areas for their colleges. This lets college staff manage templates, end of term roll-overs, assist faculty in course development, and provide focused training and support for that college.

They discussed support for their Medicine and Law colleges. These both had unique requirements. For example, Law has different term start and end dates.

Problems they've found

• Non-academic use of WebCT is increasing for things like continuing education courses, campus-wide worker health and safety course, orientation for prospective students, etc. This means they have to deal with people who do not have UWO accounts (like our NSID). Our NSID policy gets people accounts a bit easier.
• We have to watch out for java updates. It is very important to have ONLY the java update recommended, and no others on the system. Diagnosing popup problems and java problems are the biggest help desk headache.
• Also watch out for "frozen" computer labs. Installing updates may mean that the labs must be "unfrozen", modified, then "frozen" again. For example, there was an issue with security certificates which expired in the middle of a term.

Best Quote

"If you give a mouse a cookie, he's going to want a glass of milk.

For more, see http://www2.nau.edu/~d-elearn/conference/]]> Some Stats

This fall they had 80,000 enrollments in over 6500 sections. They make a course shell for every course offered. Their University has 30,000 students in one course, "Orientation to IT Survices".. They also have all their library e-reserves online. They are also using Elluminate (web conferencing), TurnItIn (plaigerism detection) and ITV (streaming video) powerlinks.

Migration

They started out over a year ago by migrating from CE 4.1 to Vista 3 in a pilot project. In the middle of the pilot, Vista 4 was announced. So they decided to migrate the remaining systems directly to Vista 4, then do a further migration of the courses already moved to Vista 3. They found the Vista 4 migration much easier, with much better migration tools.

Here's a list of things they did related to migration:

• They reviewed all classes before migrating the class.
• They realized most classes will require some sort of cleanup after migration
• They developed a recipe that students could follow to do this cleanup then trained four students to do this task.Thge recipe for Vista 4 ended up being about 1/3 the size of the recipe for Vista 3.
• They developed a "Migration database" to track the migration status of all classes. that makes sense for 6500 sections, but may not be necessary for our system.

Their migration database had some interesting features:

• Central IT / learning centre staff did the initial migration for the faculty. This was to make sure some of the strange issues with the migration were handled properly.

• The users had a "migration request" form where they indicated what courses they wanted to migrate (one at a time). They found it easier to ask people to cut and paste the course URLs into this form to avoid confusion. They also asked when the course should be migrated, and when it would next be taught.
• The data entered went into a database, where the hired students reviewed the form for correctness, checked the priority, and updated the status as they migrated the courses.
• Priority was set based on how soon the course is to be taught, and how much time was between the migration date and the teaching date.
• There was also areas for the college dean, department heads, etc. to enter comments related to the course migration.
• All migrations were initiated by the end users. Whatever was not asked tio be migrated was left behind.
• A report was written to give to the instructor noting any problems, etc.

Lessons Learned:

• Communication is key. You must drill into people that the old server is disappearing, and they need to migrate their courses. Don't let them wait until the last minute. Communicate early, and often.
• Utilize student workers if possible.
• Give users a blank shell option instead of migrating old courses. Some users may want to simply start from scratch.
• Run some "migration labs" to help instructors with the migration. A place where they can go to get assistance during the migration.
• When using students, make sure they don't have access to live data. Give them the big scary "FERPA" speach (they could be expelled for poking about, etc.)
• It takes time to move courses between multiple servers.
• Have dedicated instructor support, and dedicated student support.
• It is good to have several administrators to cover for each other for vacations, etc.

• 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.

• Existing WebCT 4.1 instructors initially hate CE 6. They are used to how 4.1 works, and get confused and upset when they cannot find things. This is why taking it slow and emphasizing training and user support is important. Eventually they come around once they become familiar with CE6. TRAINING, TRAINING, TRAINING.
• Give existing users sandboxes to play in so they can experiment without worrying about screwing up their real courses.
• New faculty who have never used 4.1 appear really like CE6 and have no problems.
• Students appear to have very little problems with CE6 itself. There are the typical help desk problems (popup blockers, java runtime, etc.) but once they get past that it seems easy to use.
• There were some issues with Macs, but those appear to have mostly been resolved with the later service paks.
• Course migration is not as easy as clicking a button. Instructors will require assistance in changing their courses to fit within the new CE6 way of doing things. There will be problems with things like moving 4.1 "organizer pages" which contained only text blocks, no content. Those don't migrate. Need quality control and a procedure in place to make sure faculty check the courses after migration.
• Consider re-branding the system to eliminate "WebCT". For example, call it "My Courses". After all the name is now "Blackboard" and the new version coming down the line will be something different. No sense tying in a specific product name.
• Expect it to take longer than you expect. Remember that schedules are not set in stone. CE 4.1 doesn't leave support until January 2008 so there's lots of time to do it right.
• Take it slow. Have a pilot with a few courses to get support and operational procedures down. Don't try to migrate everyone immediately. Run 4.1 and 6.0 in parallel for a while to provide a fallback if necessary.
• Get oracle training (doesn't apply to us, we have oracle expertise).
• Work with your instructional designers. Give them first crack at the system. They will be the ones assisting people with redesigining their courses to work better in WebCT 6.
• Always do a backup before installing any service paks so you can easily back out of the service pak.
• Washington State put a firewall between their WebCT cluster and the rest of campus. This let them bring up the production cluster and test it before making it available to the rest of campus to use.
• Be patient with WebLogic. It can take a long time to do things. For example, 5 minutes to stop it.
• Keep a change log of ALL changes, configuration settings, etc. which includes the action taken, and the date and time it was taken. Often there are changes which have side-effects elsewhere. Keeping a log will help in tracking down what changed to cause a problem.
• Several institutions used wikis to do their online documentation. Some open just to administrators (to do change log, etc.) Others used public wikis to develop support documentation, letting students, instructors, and builders build on the wiki as problems arise. An interesting way to get better and up-to-date documentation.
• Update your disaster recovery plan for CE6 and TEST IT.

• It's a lot prettyer. Lots of snazzy new features like "live preview". Select some text, move your mouse over fonts in the font list, and the text automatically changes without having to click to let you preview. Tou have to click to permanently change it. Also lots of galleries to pick different looks from. Also "floaty". Highlight text, move your mouse over it and wait. A custom toolbar opens up showing all the things you can do to the selected item.
• Their new native formats for office product is XML. Their "docx" format is really a ".zip" file. Rename it, and you can open it up to access all the individual XML documents inside. Third party software can then edit this XML to modify the documents. For example, modify the stylesheets used. Pretty cool.
• Also talked about their "sharepoint" server. Can put individual documents on the server (for example, individual powerpoint slides). Then include those in documents. Change the main template, and it changes in the documents that included it.

• They indend to merge the BlackBoard and WebCT conferences into one conference called "Blackboard World". It will be held in the summer, when Impact normally happened. (Blackboard normally had theirs in the spring).
• The general pedegogical tracks are comparable in both conferences.
• Will continue with the pre conference workshops. This is something Blackboard never did before.
• They will be merging the community sites and web sites soon.
• They are examining the certification programs for trainers. They plan to continue this, but need more work on the details.

Licensing Questions

• They will continue to honour multi-year agreements that are in place and will continue to offer multi-year contracts.
• Some people voiced concerns for the portfolio licencing model. Their site would have to pay $37,000 which they said just wouldn't happen. Blackboard is offering some discounts for pilot programs. Talk to the service managers.
• They will be discontinuing perpetual licenses, but will grandfather those who already have these licenses.
• They will continue to offer consortia licensing. Currently negotiating these on a case by case basis.

New Support Structure

• There will now be a dedicated technical suppport rep for each institution who will be familiar with our setup. dedicated as in the person may support several institutions, but that person always will support our institution (aside from vacations, etc.)
• They are developing the "behind the blackboard" customer self service support site. Includes incident tracking monitoriing, downloads, etc. No additional cost.
• They will be making all known issues available to users again. WebCT used to do this, then lately they stopped.

Long Term single product strategy

• They will continue to keep releasing application paks for both Blackboard and WebCT product lines. These will keep moving the two systems closer together.
• Blackboard will continue to market their other products as cross platform so they work on both systems (naturally more sales for them).
• They intend to start design of the next generation system this year. Development will start in 2007. Release will be in 2008 or 2009. (although they disclaim this and say it all might change).

Reliability of Service Paks

Lately there have been a lot of recalls on service paks. They release a service pak, then a note not to install it, then a patch for the service pak, etc. People asked Blackboard to make sure they thoroughly test a new service pak before release, because now backing out of a service pak can be extremely time consuming.

One best practices recommendation is to do a full backup of the system before installing a service pak.

Test Environments

Some people wanted some clear instructions for best practices and recommendations for setting up test environments, like what is provided for production environments.

A lecture capture system lets you capture and publish in class lectures for later review. It is not a replacement fr distance education. It is instead a method of on-demand post class review for students.

Features

• Automatically records the session. Instructor enters time in schedule. The recording automatically starts and stops at the time indicated. No buttons to push, or equipment to fiddle with.
• Can integrate with existing smart classroom devices. Computers with webcams for video, document projection systems, smart whiteboards, audio recording, etc.
• Automaitically analyzes the lecture and builds a logical scene index. For example, when a slide changes or something new is written on the whiteboard.
• Users can control speed of playback. For example, people can usually understand what people say faster than they can say it so for review we can speed up the presentation. Sound still stays at the same pitch (doesn't get higher as we go faster).

Benefits

• Raw productivity increases for students. Courses that were typically bi-modal (a lot of studnets above the average and a lot below the average, very few on the average) ended up getting rid of the lower spike. Students could review the lectures on their own time so became better students. There were also higher completion rates.
• Statistics provide a better insight to instructors of student study habits.
• Students have immediate access to content, and can access it 24 / 7.
• This leverages the technology investments already in place for smart classrooms, etc.

Implementation

• The benefits only show up when the system is used for ALL lectures in a course. Implies this should be in a dedicated classroom, not a "cart" situatiojn, so the system is always there ready to go.
• The implementation had to be easy. Instructors need to use it as easily as they use an overhead machine. Enter the room number and times, and the rest is automatic. They just teach the course.
• The system can be adapted for different classroom capabilities. At the low end is capturing of only audio, or audio automatically broken up into "scenes". That can be done and is compatible with podcasting. At a higher level, you can combine audio with course visuals (powerpoint), then video, and then specialized devices like document projectors and smartboards.

Important Traits

• Modular and flexible capture options. Can be used in a variety of smart classroom situations.
• Ease of use. Instructor schedules it and then teaches normally. Everything else is automatic (capture, publication, student authentication, etc.)
• Integrated. Can import class lists from Banner. Uses an XML based API. Works with various streaming servers, including Helix. Can integrate with WebCT, itunes University, etc.
• Scaleable. Audio for one hour lecture takes about 30Mb. Add video and visuals and this jumps to 150 Mb.
• Works best when used in dedicated multimedia smart classrooms so that the system can easily schedule the room and automatically start up hardware, etc. Much more difficult to schedule a media cart. Must also make it available for all a faculty's lectures, not here and there.

For an idea of the scope, their system is running on Vista 3 on sun/solaris and Oracle. Their server typically has between 3000 and 4000 course sections.

Their discussion emphasized the importance of a good disaster recovery strategy. More than just relying on backups. After all, with a site as large as theirs, it could take a week to restore the courses from backup. Faster more efficient recovery strategies are required.

Some of the main points to ponder:

• Redundancy. They have redundant load balancers, redundant application servers, etc.
• They have three environments, DEV, QA, and Production. The production servers are stored in a separate location about a mile away from the other servers. They are set up so they can quicly restore the database on the test / QA systems to have them become an emergency production server if necessary.
• They pointed out there are two types of failure. Systems failure, and data failure.
• For systems failure,there is typical backup and restore procedures. They examined a variety of database recovery systems. They like RAC, but that's only available in 10g which isn't available to them until they upgrade to Vista 4 application pak 1. They do support using a standby database
. For data failure, they examined several optoins.
• SAN with daily BCV snapshots. This is good because they can copy the BSV snapshot to the test server to make it production. however, the snapshot is not directly recoverable.
• SRDF Copy, they didn't use that because of no internal mirroring and not protected SAN space.
• They opted for Oracle Data Guard using physical standby, maximum performance mode with no optional delay.They don't use max protection mode because if the standby crashes, the production server will lock waiting for it to return. The no optional delay option means they cannot easily recover if an instructor does something silly and wipes out a course.
• They are considering some changes including:
  • Use "Max Availability" mode as a compromie between max protection and max performance.
  • Changing the "no optional delay" setting so that they can recover from user errors.
  • Developing a way to test the disaster recovery procedures. Currently tough to do without disrupting operations.
  • Possibly move disaster recovery off campus to another city.Implies they may need better network connections.
  • Explanding the use of the standby database to use in read-only mode for data mining and section archiving
• The resovery time for disaster recovery is 24 - 48 hours, so they don't use it for power outtages, etc. They just tell people the system will be down during that time.
• They currently have 200Gb allocated to archiv e logs. The database is 800Gb. By May, they expect this to be 1.5 Terabytes. It takes them about one week to do full backups.

Planning

Planning should be campus wide. You need to communicate that the Learning Management system is a mission critical institutional system, just like HR or SIS. It requires basic infrastructure spending for hardware upgrades.

Maintenance Schedule

They recommend one six-hour downtime be blocked every two weeks to install service paks, etc. More time is required for major upgrades. Use this downtime even if not needed, to get the customers used to the system being unavailable during those times.

Networking Setup

They recommend splitting the public network (communications between users and the application servers) from the private network (communications between the cluster, load balancer, and database). This makes it easier to monitor the traffic separately. If we find a lot of database activity, we can upgrade the internal network. If we find a lot of user hits, we can upgrade the external network.

It is important to track usage over time to identify spikes, and ongoing trends, so we can plan for expanding the cluster well in advance.

Setup and Recovery

Try to remove human error from the equation by making setup scripts that automate installation and setup as much as possible. This will ensure compatibility of nodes, and gives the ability to rebuild nodes quickly in an emergency.

System Monitoring

We need to monitor two things. Reliability, and Scalability. Reliability is done using things like Nagios to monitor low disk usage, server status, etc. Scalability can be monitored using "Cacti". This shows trend analysis, time of day spikes, etc. (I've never heard of Cacti but should look into it). Currently we can get some of this information using web log analysis tools like Analog. But we also need to monitor database usage, internal and external network usage, disk usage over time on both the application and database servers, etc.

Backup and Recovery

They recommended backing up the database to disk instead of to tape in order to do a quick backup. This could include doing a database snapshot, checkpointing, etc. Need to discuss this with DBAs to find the option that provides the best recovery options at the best price.

• They really recommend having a test system running on the same hardware configuration as production. One reason is to have a spare hardware box that can easily be swapped for the production hardware to reduce downtime. We plan to have a test server available, but I have to discuss with Denise exactly how that system will operate and on what hardware.
• They say one application server will handle about 500 concurrent users. WebCT Support Services can help analyze our 4.1 system to see how many concurrent users we have.
• The WebCT CE 6 application server uses about 1Gb RAM plus 1.5 Gb of disk swap space. This does not change as we get larger boxes. So, a 4Gb machine and a 20Gb machine will operate the same. The best way to add capacity is to cluster more servers, not to get a bigger server. This also improves redundancy.
• A typical minimum recommended system for production is one application server, and one database server.
• A minimum recommended system for a clustered environment requires five servers. Two application servers, an administrative server to manage the cluster, a load balancer (installed on a server or dedicated hardware) and a Database server. This should also be repeated for test, and if necessary development servers. They recommend that all these servers operate on the same hardware platforms. That way, if one box crashes, you can take one of the test boxes, or one of the application server boxes, and use it to replace the broken box if you have to.
• The administrative box is required to properly run the cluster. If the box fails, the cluster can run up to 24 hours before the box must be replaced. However, when it is replaced, you must reboot the entire cluster. Again, they emphasize keeping a spare box to swap in to minimize downtime. In an emergency, we could bring the administrator machine up as a separate process on one of the nodes (with its own separate IP address) until we can get a new admin box. However, that would require a reboot of the cluster. It is also not recommended, because if the node containing the admin box crashes, the entire cluster crashes.
• If a node in the cluster crashes, you can replace the box and only have to restart that one node, not the entire cluster.
• The database is currently the single point of failure. If the database fails, there's no way to easily cluster it to provide a redundant service. This means that backup strategies for the server is vital. We must be able to restore the database quickly. I need to discuss this more thoroughly with Denise and the DBAs so i thoroughly understand the options available to provide quickest backup recovery.
• You still need to reboot clusters after applying service paks. They recommend setting up a routine maintenance window.
• Regarding application pak 1 and Oracle 10g. If you have already installed CE 6 on Oracle 9i, you are stuck with Oracle 9i. You have to install each service pak (1, 2, and 3) then the application pak. If you want to upgrade to Oracle 10g, you have to do a completely new install. Useful for us to consider when moving to production. We may want to reinstall our test server. Or we may wait for a migration path to Oracle 10g. Must discuss with Denise.
• One possible option for a test server is to install all the pieces of a cluster on one test server. Saves us from having to purchase a bunch of hardware, but also reduces redundancy if we need to take a server to fix production, because we would be taking our entire test system.

Section Manager Utility

This tool lets instructors manage enabling WebCT for their sections. The system shows instructors the courses they are teaching. The instructors can then enable them for WebCT. They can also select multiple sections and tell the system to crosslist those sections for them.

We may want to look at doing something like their front end for our users. It would be nice if instructors could turn on and off WebCT support themselves, instead of having to get someone to update the information in Banner. The slides have some example screen shots.

Section Creation and Loading

This tool compliments the Section Manager utility. It allows instructors to integrate the WebCT course with their custom SIS. It validates people against their central LDAP system, loads class lists into WebCT, etc. Note that they authenticate internally in WebCT using the student's student number as their userid. In some ways, with Banner, SSAM and Luminis, we are far ahead of them because we don't need these tools.

Shared Document Tool

This is really cool. It's basically a Wiki that can be run stand alone, but also integrated into WebCT. People can store files of any type to work on group projects. It monitors document relationships, allows instructors to monitor document development, etc. There's an "annotate" option where instructors can highlight passages and add an annotation, which is nice. The tool also uses their in-house wysiwyg HTML editor. They say they will be making the tool available for free, so we'll have to watch for that.

Projects in progress

There are also several other projects they are currrently working on:

• OPSCAN integration. This will let them read opscan data, and (keying on the student number) load the results into the WebCT gradebook. The main problems they have are with students messing up when they put their student number on the opscan sheet.
• Grade reporting from WebCT. We already have this in Banner integration, although our Banner team asked us to turn that off.
• Media Matrix Integration. This integrates WebCT with their streaming video server. Faculty and students can both put media on the streaming server, then include this media in their WebCT courses. We should look at something like this to make better use of our campus streaming video server, making it an easy to use institutional system.
• CAS Integration. They currently authenticate students internally in WebCT. They are still working on a campus wide central authentication system, like our NSID.

Nice to know that in some ways we are ahead of an institution as large as Texas A and M.

Application Pak 1 for WebCT 6 has just been released. We intend to install it soon on our test WebCT 6 server, so it will be available when people start trying CE 6 out on campus. Service Pak 1 provides more student centred tools, better customization, and improved efficiencies for course participants.

Active Learning Tools

• There is now peer review. For example, in discussions, blogs, journals, etc. students can rate other students comments on a "five star" scale. (The course builder can determine the scale for the ratings). They can also leave comments. There's an ability to quickly get a graphical view of the ratings.
• There's a new "student contributions" tool. Students can now create course content to share with the rest of the class. This can be loaded into the media library. They select "create entry", and add their own contribution to the library, including uploading of files to share with the class. Can also contribute to the "web links" tool to help build a community shared bookmark list related to the course.
• There are now "student journals" and "class blogs". For example, a nursing class can have nurses record a private journal of their internship shared only with themselves and the instructor. Or, they can post information in public blogs. Sort of like the discussion tool, but made to look more like a blog. Instructors can get stats on number of postings, leave comments on entries, etc.

New "Goals" tool

• There is a new tool to list goals for students in the course.
• Goals can be categorized. You can have goals for a unit, course, program, etc.The course builder can define the categories.
• All parts of your course (assignments, content, discussions, etc.) related to a goal can be attached to that goal. Select the goal from the list, and everything relevant to achieving that goal is now displayed in one place.

Course Roster

• Used to build community in a course.
• Students and instructors can provide information about themselves. Interests, hobbies, etc. Can also upload pictures of students.
• Users create their own profile, and use is voluntary.

New Grading forms tool

• Allows course builders to define "rubrics" for grading students on things like discussions, assignments, etc.
• Rubrics are displayed to instructor. Can easily grade the student by selecting checkboxes in the rubric. Can also leave comments for students, etc.
• Instructors can get stats on the rubric. For example, a graph showing the relative proportion of students who fell in each category in the rubric.

There are also many new functions in myWebCT, and minor improvements in many of the other tools.

Main points:

• We have to re-examine the backup-restore issues. Faculty may not be able to restore their own courses even if we do set them up as course instructors, because course instructors may only be able to restore at the course level, not the section level.
• Students had little problem migrating to new system.
• 4.1 instructors oringally hated new system. There is a huge need for training and handholding to get people used to WebCT 6. most however liked it once they became familiar with it.
• New designers had very little problem with the new system.
• Need to get help desk staff involved and aware of possible problems. Most common problems are:
  1. Disable popup blockers
  2. Remove all but one version of the Java Runtime environment. Can really mess things up if you have more than one version installed. Could pass validation tests, but still not work properly.
  3. Make sure java runtime environment is the recommended one (1.4.2 or higher I think).

This is a quick summary of the key points. More details to follow as I get time to enter them.

Traditioinal handling of Knowledge:

• Traditionally we organize knowledge in Hierarchies. This is because knowlege usually refers to specific things and you can only put things in one place at a time. For example, books in a library.
• Sometimes we take "metadata" about the physical items, and organize those separately. For example, the card catalogue for a library. We can then organizse those by author, subject, etc. But it is still very structured.
• We've come to trust other authorities to organize our knowledge for us. The encyclopedia Britanica. Librarians, etc. We trust the Encyclopedia Britannica because we know the information there is put there by experts.

The web is changing this in many ways:

• No longer a hierarchical structure. Web sites are moving more towards letting people form their own hierarchies. For example, a library where a person searches for 19th century history. Then within that searches for female authors, then within that for non-fiction. The user builds the hierarchy, not an external person. "Every time you optimize knowledge you deoptimize it for someone else".
• Metadata is disappearing. Now that we can store the entire document online, the document itself becomes the metadata. For example, I search for the first line of a song. I can then find out the author, what albums contain the song, etc. The song itself is the metadata.
• Tools like Wikipedia allow the development of community shared knowledge. The information is developed by the entire community, and NOT OWNED BY ANY INDIVIDUAL. This implies some trust in the information (is this person posting the information an expert). But it is also self regulating. As the wikipedia inventor says, a topic is stable once people stop posting corrections to it.