Lister Hill Letter
Newsletter of the Lister Hill Library of the Health Sciences at UAB

January/February 1999

WebCT Facilitates the Building of Web-based Educational Environments

WebCT (World Wide Web Course Tools)  is a software system that facilitates the creation of World Wide Web-based educational environments. It can be used to create entire on-line courses, or to simply publish materials that supplement existing courses.  A software system developed by Murray Goldburg, Ph.D. at the University of British Columbia, it is a set of academic course management tools designed and thought out by an academician for academicians, which is extraordinary for the software marketplace.  Herein lies the strength of WebCT (http://www.webct.com/webct/), from the beginning, the software was designed specifically to address the diversity of needs for on-line University courseware.  WebCT does more than simply act like a course content organizer, it provides a spectrum of tools and mandrels.  Examples of activities that WebCT supports are a conferencing system, on-line chat, student progress tracking, group project organization, student self-evaluation, grade maintenance and distribution, access control, navigation tools, auto-marked quizzes, electronic mail, course calendar, student homepages and others.  Both the flexibility of construction and the breadth of the tools make WebCT a well-integrated software system to use in establishing a Web-based foundation for either a fully distance-based education effort or a traditional class-room based education effort that can be augmented with a Web-based component.
Any faculty or staff with an interest in exploring how WebCT might be used to put course material on-line can access the WebCT server now available free of charge within Learning Technologies at Lister Hill Library.  The current UAB WebCT campus web site (unlimited license) can be browsed at http://courses.uab.edu and anyone wishing to build a course can use the "Request a WebCT Designer Course" link on the http://www.uab.edu/distancelearning site to request the creation of starting WebCT Course.  The seminar Dr. Goldburg  presented on Wednesday August 14th on WebCT can be reviewed at the www.uab.edu/distancelearning site also.  Please send any questions about the WebCT or the server to Mike McBride (4-0410)( ) at Learning Technologies, Lister Hill Library, UAB.