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Online classes often come with feelings of dread: dread of forced communication on discussion folders, dread of forgetting a week’s worth of assignments, dread of sitting down to watch a lecture video rather than the latest movie release.
Many students have experienced the flurry of nerves as they rush to complete online coursework, mired in books and papers spread in a swath across the table, or the moment of doubt when, fingers poised over the keyboard, they forget whether a class uses WebCT or Blackboard.
Next year, this will not happen.
“Next year at this time, there will be no WebCT,” said John Gregory, executive director of Information Technologies at the University of Maine.
The University of Maine pays $45,600 annually to use WebCT, an online coursework software system the university has utilized since 1998. The University of Maine system pays a yearly contract to use Blackboard, a similar software system, and distributes it among the system’s seven universities.
Although UMaine has not been responsible for the cost of both software systems, students have expressed frustration over the similarity between the systems and over the perception that neither offers a feature that sets it ahead of the other.
“I think they’re both really easy to use, but I think it makes sense to have one program instead of variations that confuse others,” said Hannah Hudson, a third-year international affairs student with a Spanish concentration. “For me, I understand them. I can work the program, but each is a different set-up. For first-years coming in, they haven’t used them, so they’d have to learn different programs to take classes.”
Hudson said that she has taken approximately 10 classes “with a Blackboard or WebCT component where they’re posting discussion, notes, or videos. Some had both the FirstClass conference and the additional programs.”
Rachel Keating, a third-year animal science student with a pre-veterinary concentration, said she has taken about the same number of classes with an online component as Hudson.
“I think the first time I used Blackboard was sophomore year, and I thought it was just another version of WebCT,” Keating said. “It was inconvenient. My problem is remembering all the usernames and passwords for Blackboard and WebCT.”
With the elimination of WebCT, students will no longer be confused.
“I’m eagerly anticipating it,” Gregory said, explaining the savings from eliminating WebCT. He said UMaine has paid for the WebCT contract for this school year, which will expire in August 2011. After that, students will no longer use WebCT for online coursework.
Gregory said IT has decided to move away from WebCT due to advances made in the Blackboard software.
“They’ve redesigned the product so this new version, Blackboard 9.0, is a new program,” Gregory said.
IT has monitored the evolution of the Blackboard software since 2006, when, now parent company, Blackboard Inc. bought WebCT, Inc. for $178 million, according to a 2006 press release from Blackboard Inc. Since the merger, Blackboard has been developing its software, and Gregory believes the software has reached a point where the university can now rely solely on this program.
In the five fiscal years since the merger, UMaine has spent $228,000 on WebCT. Rather than switch from WebCT to Blackboard immediately after the merger, IT waited until Blackboard had developed a way for professors who currently use WebCT to transfer their online classes to the Blackboard software.
“It was only last year that Blackboard released Blackboard 9.0, which provided migration tools for courses developed in WebCT,” Gregory wrote in an e-mail. “Prior to that, there was no method for migrating existing WebCT courses to Blackboard.”
“I’ll be delighted when we get out of the $45,600 WebCT license next year,” he said.
FirstClass is another software system that UMaine students and staff use for online communication. Many UMaine professors use its conferencing aspect both to post and receive assignments, to distribute lecture notes and to maintain communication with their students.
According to Gregory, more than 450 UMaine courses have FirstClass conferences; however, Gregory does not believe that FirstClass could support online classes to the degree that Blackboard can.
“FirstClass isn’t exactly a learning management system,” Gregory said. “Some people are just using it to communicate, some are sharing notes and some are posting syllabi.”
Blackboard offers discussion boards for classmates to use when discussing a course, and students and faculty can send messages to each other through its internal messaging service.
UMaine pays $75,400 each year to provide FirstClass to students, faculty and staff. Gregory said the university currently has no plans to explore the possibilities of using Blackboard’s internal messaging system in lieu of FirstClass.
“That’s a question for a bigger group in the academic community to decide,” Gregory said. “It’s not unreasonable. It’s a question we ought to ask ourselves on a regular basis.”
While the university is not currently planning to eliminate the use of an e-mail system separate from Blackboard, it is possible that a different e-mail system could be used. Each UMaine student currently has two e-mail addresses, a FirstClass e-mail and one hosted by Google. In the future, Gregory said, UMaine e-mail might be limited to the Google addresses.
“It may be that Google mail will become more robust to provide some of this collaboration beyond just e-mail, and that might present the opportunity to end UMaine’s need for FirstClass,” Gregory said.
Gregory emphasized, however, that a move away from FirstClass is solely speculative at this point and is not expected to happen soon.
“There is an IT discussion group at the system level that I am [a member of],” said Gregory. “We do have discussions of what we’ll do. Clearly it’s not a UMaine decision. We’re one of seven campuses. We have a vote, but we don’t dictate.”
“I think we’re pretty wedded to Blackboard at this point,” Gregory said, stressing that a change in e-mail, either to use of Blackboard’s messaging system or to the sole use of Google e-mails, is not going to happen in conjunction with the elimination of WebCT. “[Blackboard] has become a better product, so I don’t see us moving away from that anytime soon.”
“I think it would be useful, obviously for the convenience. At the same time, I wish more teachers would use [Blackboard],” Keating said. “I actually like WebCT. I didn’t find it hard to use. I don’t use Blackboard that much, but if it’s easy to convert, it’s easy enough to learn.”
