<h3><font color=”#003366″>WebCT and E-Campus</font></h3>
<p>In response to the Instructional Enhancement Initiative (<a href=”http://www.uclanews.ucla.edu/Docs/HLSW319.html”>I.E.I.</a>) in the summer of 1997, <a href=”http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/people/wayne/”>Wayne Miller</a> of the then Humanities Computing Facility, researched ways to host individual class web sites for several hundred UCLA undergraduate humanities classes. Wayne liked Course in a Box from MadDuck Technologies (later purchased by Blackboard), but Course in a Box broke under the latest NT service pack. <a href=”http://www.lotus.com/home.nsf/welcome/learnspace”>Lotus LearningSpace</a>, based on Lotus Notes, was prohibitively expensive. The decision was made to use WebCT. What Wayne, and my predecessor, Evan Nisonson, did was truly astonishing—even the <a href=”http://chronicle.com/che-data/articles.dir/art-43.dir/issue-47.dir/47a02101.htm”>Chronicle</a> said so. </p>
<h3><font color=”#003366″>WebCT and Me</font></h3>
<p>After several years working as a multimedia developer and technical consultant, I got interested in teaching again in the spring of 1998, largely because I was intrigued by the new support for teaching with technology. I was a T.A., so I had to use the faculty member of record’s log in code in order to add content to the site for my classes. The login code was a long string of numbers and letters that made very little sense to me. I was completely under whelmed by WebCT. I thought it was slow, clumsy, ugly, and navigationally silly. I used it anyway, but I subverted much of the built javascript, and relied on my own hand-built html. I wasn’t, in fact, much impressed with the way the I.E.I. was implemented either, as I wrote in a letter to my departmental chair, later printed in his <a href=”http://www.mla.org/ade/bulletin/N121/121047.htm”>review of the initiative for ADE</a>.</p>
<p>When I was hired by HCF as the Instructional Technology Coordinator in January of 2000 we were running WebCT 1.3, and using ColdFusion and custom Perl scripts as middle ware. HCF had been looking for a Unix Administrato/Programmer for some time, and was relying on pre-built templates and class generation scripts that the last admin had thoughtfully written far in advance, through Summer 2000. In Spring of 2000 the I.E.I. third year review took place. Part of that review included a “software” review. Wayne offered to do the contact-the-vendors and get a quote part, if I did a general study of what our users wanted and needed, and the products that met those needs. </p>
<h3><font color=”#003366″>I.E.I 2000 Review</font></h3>
<p>Working with Wayne Miller, I looked at other course hosting solutions, including SSCNET’s homegrown ClassWeb. We consulted faculty, in person, via surveys, and in email, as well as undergraduate students and T.A.s, to determine what they felt was important. I also contacted my peers on campus, and lots of the technologists I’d met in my previous job.</p>
<h3><font color=”#003366″>Criteria? You mean features, right?</font></h3>
<p>We established a list of <a href=”http://www.lisaspangenberg.com/it/hosting/criteria.html”>criteria</a> that we felt were crucial for any hosting system. I looked at what other schools were using, contacted people I knew personally, emailed others, and created sample class sites on a wide variety of products. You can see my <a href=”http://www.lisaspangenberg.com/it/hosting/webshells.html”>bibliography</a>.</p>
<p>You can read the notes I made for my final <a href=”http://www.lisaspangenberg.com/it/hosting/report.html”>report</a>, but given that E-Campus depended on Wayne and on me, with end user support from the trained graduate student assistants, ITCs, I felt the choice really came down to WebCT versus BlackBoard, and favored WebCT. My recommendation was based primarily on user features, support from WebCT and local familiarty, and concerns about data access, though cost was also important. I didn’t like WebCT, but I didn’t find any of the alternatives any better for our users. In fact, no one I contacted really felt any true product loyalty—mostly people felt their software was “adequate.” We decided to upgrade to WebCT 3.x, realizing we’d need to have a full year to implement all the changes, and to allow for unexpected problems, and the fact that much of the work would have to wait until summer.</p>
<h3><font color=”#003366″>Enter: The Unix Guy</font></h3>
<p>But then, finally, in June of 2000, we were able to find, and hire our <a href=”http://www.hcf.ucla.edu/news/bruced.html”>Unix Guy</a>. Bruce’s first task was to set up WebCT 3.0 on a new server, relegating the previous courses to an archive server where they could be restored and accessed if faculty wanted to. This was not a simple undertaking; aside from installing WebCT, Bruce also had to create new Perl scripts to massage data, and communicate between the data collection and WebCT, as well as generate accounts and create classes, though initially we still depended on Cold Fusion for much of the process. WebCT promised an API, and source, but neither ever really materialized. Had I known in March of 2000 that we would have a top notch systems engineer/programmer on board, I’d likely have not been so enthused about upgrading WebCT. Over and over again, Bruce proved to be able to code maintainable reliable solutions with user-friendly GUIs.</p>
<h3><font color=”#003366″>New E-Campus</font></h3>
<p>New E-Campus, as we called it informally, went live in Fall 2000, after extensive testing in the summer. We offered all users, for the first time, a single login page, and global permanent IDs. Bruce continued to refine and improve the admin side, creating custom utility scripts and admin pages at my request, and, by Fall 2001, had removed all but one very small ColdFusion routine in terms of E-Campus proper. </p>
<p>As Bruce and I thought about and refined My E-Campus, we began to wonder about the viability of slowly, gradually replacing WebCT completely, using a Perl back end for processing, and incorporating opensource, local, and commercial tool modules.</p>
<h3><font color=”#003366″>To Upgrade or Not to Upgrade</font></h3>
<p>In March of 2000 WebCT sent a representative to pitch the forthcoming WebCT 3.5 to us. As far as I could tell, WebCT proposed to raise our yearly licensing fee from 4000 to 21,000, for the year, with thousand dollar price increases built in to renewal fees for the next two years, a promise of portal support, and, if we paid now, more features in the all-java 4.0. Since they hadn’t fixed bugs in 3.1 that were there in 3.0 and 1.3, I wasn’t impressed. Nor did I see any point in “upgrading,” since we weren’t getting anything new. We invited WebCT to persuade us, and even participated in a conference call, but Bruce, Wayne, and I were not persuaded upgrading made sense. The decision was made to stay where we were.</p>
