Tuesday, June 22, 1999

A Web 'Wizard' Helps Professors Put Their Course Information On Line By FLORENCE OLSEN A "Course Web Wizard" created by the University of Missouri at St. Louis can help professors put their course information on line easily and quickly, computing officials at the university say. "We've created something without all the bells and whistles, something any faculty member can pick up in a half hour and use effectively," says one administrator. The wizard automates Web-page coding in much the same way that Windows wizards automate various computer set-up tasks -- walking professors through the steps of putting their course information on line, but not requiring them to have technical knowledge. Creating a single World-Wide Web page manually can be accomplished fairly quickly, says Jerrold Siegel, the coordinator of campus computing at U.M.S.L. But integrating the six different sections of a typical course Web site -- syllabus, announcements, assignments, links, asynchronous discussion, and library access -- is time-consuming without a wizard. U.M.S.L.'s Course Web Wizard is the brainchild of Lawrence K. Pickett, Jr., the university's assistant director of user services. He and a graduate student worked in several languages familiar to Internet programmers -- Perl script, JavaScript, Java, and hypertext markup language -- to create the wizard. Their wizard isn't the only one available for making course Web pages. But companies that sell templates for on-line courses usually pack too many features into their products, in Mr. Siegel's view. "We've created something without all the bells and whistles, something any faculty member can pick up in a half hour and use effectively," Mr. Siegel says. And U.M.S.L. lends the source code free of charge to any university that requests it. So far, two other universities -- Oakland University and the University of Tennessee at Martin -- have asked for the Course Web Wizard, Mr. Pickett says. The U.M.S.L. template simplifies Web-site design not only for faculty members but also for students who go to course Web sites seeking information. "We wanted some sort of standardization, so that when kids go to the Web pages they know where things are," Mr. Siegel says. The professors who teach Spanish 172 and Accounting 343, for example, are among those who regularly post standard course-information pages on-line with the Course Web Wizard. Because the wizard was intended to be easy to use, though, professors can't rely on it for advanced page-design tasks. For instance, faculty members looking for help with on-line testing will not find it in the Course Web Wizard. "It's a weakness we're not going to fix," Mr. Siegel says. "We're really looking for simplicity." He says that commercial software packages, such as eRoom, are useful for teachers who want to administer and grade tests on line, although he notes that the tools add to the workload of systems administrators. As it is now, after Mr. Pickett gives faculty members the secure user-identification and password they need to access the Course Web Wizard, his work is done. "That's pretty much the end of my involvement," he says, "unless they have a particular question." Some professors have experimented with embellishing their course pages, adding links to external audio, image, or video files. But multimedia use in course Web design is still in its infancy, Mr. Siegel says. Professors are free to create any combination of external links to public documents on the Web, Mr. Siegel says. But because of legal concerns they need permission to move any copyrighted files onto the university's Web server. He adds that disk space on the university's Web server has become "so inexpensive that we're able to allow the faculty effectively as much space as they want, within reason." Last semester, 20 faculty members used the course wizard to post information for 30 U.M.S.L. courses. Each semester, two or three more professors sign up to use the wizard, Mr. Siegel says. New faculty members arrive on campus wanting to put their course syllabi on line, he says, so his staff is always "getting the new ones started, while we proselytize to the people who have been here awhile."