| School | Have you settled on a Course Management
System (e.g., Blackboard, WebCT, eCollege)? |
If so, which product was selected? | How much is it being used? For example, by how many faculty? Or in how many classes over the span of one academic year? | How much IT staff time (hours/week, FTE, etc.) is being used in support of the product and those who use it? |
| Amherst | Yes | BlackBoard | Fabulous! This is the second semester in production, and we have 50% of the faculty with courseinfo websites, and 45% of the faculty, from all departments. Terrific. | Hard to say. We have been running a large
number of introductory seminars, about 1.5 hours in length, that are adequate to get the basics
done. In addition, we have run about a dozen lunch time discussions, with presentations by
faculty, about how they use. There are certainly some phone calls asking questions, but we selected Blackboard over WebCT because of ease of use. We have a Mellon grant that was to provide $1000 of student labor per faculty member in the program. Before BlackBoard, faculty were coming but then doing nothing because even with the student labor, they saw it as too much work, too complicated. With Blackboard, they are saying "what would I use this student labor for? I can do it all myself!". I can't say enough good things about this move -it's been terrific. |
| Bates | No | |||
| Carleton | Nope | |||
| Colby | NO | |||
| Colgate | Yes | We use Blackboard predominantly, although we do have WebCT running and a few people use it. A small team of IT, library, and Committee on Technology (faculty) people went to a workshop at Wake Forest on choosing courseware tools and made a decision together. | This semester, 61 faculty (out of about 250) report
they are using Blackboard in 138 courses (out of about 450) |
I would estimate that it takes about 50% of one person's time---including setting up the server, setting up courses, etc. The whole IT staff is trained on Blackoard, so there is distributed support as well. I would not say that this has been a tremendous burden though. |
| Colorado | Nope! | |||
| Davidson | Yes | Blackboard | It is not yet installed | No experience to report yet |
| Denison | Yes | Blackboard's CourseInfo | About 70 faculty members, and 122 courses | Surprising little....about 20 hours of effort in training programs at first, and now perhaps 2-3 hrs per week in consulting and staff time to manage the server. |
| Dickinson | Yes | Blackboard | Approximately 110 Academic Classes. | Maybe 1/3 FTE |
| Franklin & Marshall | Yes | Blackboard | We are in our first semester and about 30 faculty with 45 courses are using it. We are pleased with the adoption rate. | 1 FTE spends about 15 hours a week. |
| Gettysburg | Yes | Blackboard | Approximately 80/150 faculty, 100+ courses, although courses are automatically generated for all courses so it is hard for us to give you an accurate count. | I'd say a .5 fte for support, training, new version testing, etc. |
| Hamilton | Yes, in so far as it is possible to "settle" on any information technology. | Blackboard
CourseInfo. |
We have approximately 50 faculty who started using the system this semester. This is our first semester offering this service to the entire campus, so we don't have a good idea how many instructors are continuing to use this service. | At most, 7 to 9 hours a week. However, the bulk
of that time is concentrated in the week before and first two weeks of the semester.
During those 3 weeks, it takes about 2 people to keep up with course creation, enrollments and
help calls. You may also want to know that only about 12 of the faculty using the CourseInfo system had any training on the system at all. We offered 2 hour introductory sessions before the beginning of the semester. We had 12 attendees then, but have not had any requests for training or help in using the tool since. Most of our interactions have been administrative in nature. Typical issues include: "I've forgotten my password", and "please collapse my two sections into one CourseInfo space". |
| Holy Cross | We have not settled but are leaning toward Blackboard | |||
| Hope | No | |||
| Kalamazoo | Yes | WebCT (Blackboard's pricing was prohibitive for us) | We began our WebCT pilot project at the beginning of this quarter and so far we have 19 faculty who have signed up for a WebCT course and two additional instructors who are co-designers with another faculty member. Of this number I would estimate that about 8 of the classes are actively being used (this is a guestimate based on the amount of space the classes are using). | We have set up a system for five of the IS staff who
have split up the faculty users for training/support. I do not have any figures
for you but in my own experience I have only one of my faculty members who calls very
often and I can usually answer her question in a matter of a couple (~15) minutes or so. I am also the sys admin for the system and my boss and I have spent a fair amount of time setting up scripts using the API to get data from our administrative system. WebCT has had some issues with their API breaking when they upgrade versions which has caused us a bit of aggravation. They seem to have things worked out now and WebCT has been running smoothly (We are running v 3.1). |
| Macalester | The issue currently is under debate. We
probably will pilot Blackboard or WebCT among interested faculty before a final decision.
We currently have extensive home-brew solutions: course folders, course email, library
ereserves. Bottom line = "no." |
Also:
No, we have not settled on one (although it is under active consideration by our Information Services Advisory Committee. Any decision would probably not happen before Spring 2001, with purchase and implementation in Fall 2001 at the very earliest.) |
||
| Manhattan | Yes | Blackboard -- they acquired Web-Course-in-a-Box (our prior system) | we now "initialize" every course as a placeholder in Blackboard with a download from IA Plus 2000 SIS. A few dozen courses have expanded beyond the basic course #, instructor, time, class list, etc.; ~20 faculty members show strong interest and half of those have their own content up; hopefully, more to come | guestimate: ~10-12 hrs/wk ; we were fortunate to also have a US Dept of Ed grant that allowed us to bring in Blackboard trainers for 2 days over last summer and we'll do it again over the winter intersession |
| Middlebury | we haven't settled on one package (and some initial reaction is they are too constraining) | |||
| Oberlin | Yes | Blackboard | This is the first semester that we have been using the product. We did not advertise that the product was available and still have 31 courses in 13 departments. | Installation = not sure how long this took but a
guess would be 10 hours + troubleshooting
Faculty Training = 9 hours/year - but I anticipate that this will diminish over time Setting up courses at the beginning of the semester = 10-20 hours Time during semester = 1hr/wk |
| Pomona | Not yet | We've installed WebCT in a test mode only. Haven't "settled" on it as our final solution. | we have two faculty members trying it out this semester. | very little |
| Reed | Nope | |||
| Skidmore | Not yet | we are in the process of exploring this as well. | ||
| Smith | Yes | Blackboard -- and we LOVE it! | Last academic year (our first year using Blackboard), we had approximately 230 courses use Blackboard (115 per semester). That's about 25% of all courses listed in our catalog (it is a higher percentage of courses offered during 99-00). | We have allocated a staff member to support the faculty. It is her primary responsibility, although she also supports a couple specialized classrooms and labs. I would estimate that her support effort is .75 - .80 FTE. Other staff in our Educational technology group provide occasional support and the Help Desk staff support students who use Blackboard. There is some backroom support of the software from the Systems and Networking group and we do daily feeds from Banner to Blackboard. This involves the Administrative Technology staff. Putting a total support FTE would be difficult, but it is definitely over 1.0 FTE. |
| Trinity U. | Yes | Blackboard | About 70 classes were created only about 40 are in current use. We had a late start with this product towards the end of the spring semester last year. I don't think that some of the faculty had enough time to get comfortable with it. We expect the usage to go up in the spring semester. | Initially we had 2 people working on getting the server up and going and now we have one person who support it and he spends about 2 hours a week on it. |
| Union | Yes | Blackboard | We have just purchased it -- are in the process of installing and setting up training. | |
| Vassar | NO. We use a combination of individual functions: shared file space on an NT server for courses; Web Board for chat; individual Web pages for instructors. To date, faculty tell us they don't want the integrated product, which has an impersonal feel to them. Probably not a scalable strategy, however, and we are revisiting the system approach. | |||
| Wabash | Yes. | Blackboard. We're currently running CourseInfo version 4.08. We will upgrade to Blackboard 5 Level I during our Winter Break. | About 100 faculty have requested sites (out of 300). This semester we have over 170 courses using it (out of 650). This is our second full semester using the product, and are continuing to grow in the number of faculty and classes using it. (Last semester we had about 40 faculty in 60 courses using CourseInfo. | We had one FTE paid through a grant to get CourseInfo off the ground, which was a great benefit. We now have 4 people sharing responsibility. Staff time is cyclical. In the first few weeks of classes it's probably equivalent to 1 FTE. Now in mid-semester it's probably one-half. |
| Washington & Lee | We've been using Web Course in a Box for a bit more than two years. We're currently evaluating Blackboard and other products, since development of WCB has been discontinued. | It's used for about 50 classes a year. | IT staff time is significantly higher at start-up than several years into the project. Initially 5-10 hours per week were required to promote it, train faculty members, fine-tune the server configuration, add necessary upgrades, provide documentation, troubleshoot and answer questions. Significantly less time is required now that we've trained many faculty members, streamlined common processes such as "adding" students to a course, and developed documentation to answer common questions. | |
| Wellesley | No | |||
| Wheaton | Yes | WebCT | Last year was the first year, and about 20 faculty members used it in various ways. Earlier, our Instructional Technology folks had used Web-Course-in-a-Box, and another twenty or so were either miffed at the change in product or didn't have time to move their stuff over to WebCT. This year it looks as if that is being done, and about 25 more faculty members have attended the one-hour orientations that our Instructional Technology folks are offering. If all of these folks use it in this academic year, that would represent about a third of the continuing faculty. | Computing Services has a rather small role. We make sure that the
server (a Linux box set up by the technology staff in our Library) is on the network and gets its files backed up nightly. The Library technical
staff take responsibility for product upgrades (Linux, WebCT), etc. I'm
not sure how much time this involves, but not a lot. The Instructional Technology does training and then works with individual faculty members on implementation of faculty pages. That staff right now consists of only one person; it was two people, but the other staff member left earlier this academic year. The staff is in our Media Resources department, an appendage of the Library. |
| Whitman | Yes, as of this academic year | Blackboard | Used by 23 faculty (Whitman has approx 150
faculty total) Total classes, 43 Note: This use is for enhancing in-class experience, no online courses. This is the first term it has been used. |
hmmm, probably about .1 (not much) note: having some problems getting Blackboard tech support to fix bugs & various problems (can give more detail if needed). |
| Whittier | No, I expect we'll choose either BlackBoard or WebCT possibly for next Fall. | |||
| Williams | We're in the process of evaluating both WebCT and Blackboard. We have concurrent pilot programs going on this semester. | None yet but blackboard seems to be coming out ahead. | Only a half dozen courses so far. | Well it's a pilot program so more now than we hope will be later. |