From the issue dated December 21, 2001
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Getting Ready for a New Generation of Course-Management SystemsMore sophistication -- and higher prices -- are likely soonBy FLORENCE OLSEN Each winter quarter, Frederick Siff steps out of his role as vice president and chief information officer at the University of Cincinnati
"It's one thing I've always wanted as a teacher -- I would like to know who's out there from day one," Mr. Siff says. It is why he has been a cheerleader for the university's plans to integrate photos of students into the course-management system that he and many Cincinnati faculty members and students now use on a daily basis. The course-management systems -- sometimes called courseware -- are Web-based software programs that provide online versions of class rosters, course outlines, assignments, discussions, quizzes, and grade books. Colleges are expanding their use of the software. "What's striking to me is the data confirm the fact that course-management software is now part of the instructional infrastructure," says Kenneth C. Green, director of the Campus Computing Project, an annual survey of colleges' use of information technology. Mr. Green says one-fifth of all college courses now use course-management systems. "Here's a case where campus officials are saying, This is important, let's get ahead of the curve, standardize on product Q, and that way we'll simplify our user-support issues." The systems spare faculty members from having to photocopy and distribute course packs, and mean that students don't have to hike to a professor's office to look up grades that were posted on the door, or call classmates to ask about the next reading assignment. Such features simplify the administrative tasks of teaching and learning, even if, as some critics say, they don't improve a professor's actual teaching or students' learning. At many colleges, not all faculty members use the systems, and in any case their usefulness depends largely on how much effort is put into giving them helpful features. But even critics anticipate advances in course-management systems over the next five to seven years that will make the software more flexible, more capable of handling multimedia materials for online learning and research -- and much more expensive. Affordable -- for Now "I'm afraid to say that to our administrators, because they're going to try to say we can't afford it," says Carl F. Berger, director of advanced academic technology and professor of science and technology education at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. The software is affordable now, but computing officials remain skeptical about how long the relatively low prices will last. Small institutions pay $5,000 to $7,500 a year to license the software, which is generally made available on an institutionwide basis, with prices determined by enrollment. Larger institutions may spend $30,000 to $50,000 or more each year for the software -- nothing approaching the million-dollar licenses for administrative systems that handle financial, personnel, and student-record-keeping functions. But higher-education officials expect that courseware companies will raise their prices after creating a market for the software, and after seeing course-management systems become an indispensable part of the academic-computing infrastructure on most campuses. Courseware-company executives say they expect course-management systems to evolve into more-sophisticated academic-information systems. "The definition of the problem we're trying to solve has changed," says Matthew S. Pittinsky, chairman of Blackboard Inc. Courseware is evolving quickly, he says, from a set of relatively simple tools used to enhance a professor's individual course Web site into large-scale integrated information systems that are used for both campus-based and distance education -- by an entire campus or system of campuses or a consortium of colleges. For an additional licensing fee, Blackboard, for instance, sells portal software and a debit-accounting system -- both of which are compatible with the Blackboard course-management system. As the company integrates more functions into Blackboard, its executives anticipate signing many more "$200,000-, $300,000-, and $400,000-a-year relationships," Mr. Pittinsky says. Many colleges that have invested in course-management systems are now watching to see how the new industry will evolve. Officials are only beginning to discover ways in which the use of course-management systems raises thorny questions about the use of data automatically collected by such systems. WebCT and Blackboard have emerged, at least for now, as the top commercial contenders in an industry that got its start in academe less than five years ago. WebCT was started by a senior instructor in computer science at the University of British Columbia with software he developed for his own teaching. Blackboard grew out of the entrepreneurial programming efforts of seven undergraduates at Cornell University, who helped one business professor build a course Web site -- and then helped many professors after that. Both are now independent, for-profit companies. Blackboard's courseware has a reputation for being easier for faculty members to use, while WebCT's software is reputed to offer more functions and complexity. But academic administrators say the two companies compete mostly on the basis of how well they provide service and support to the institutions that license their software. 'A Good Rivalry' "It's a good rivalry," one that is in large part financial, says Blackboard's Mr. Pittinsky. "We've grown five times larger [than WebCT], and we'll be here for the long haul." Albertson College, in Idaho, a small residential institution with about 800 students, bought its first Blackboard license last year. The college has since experienced "exponential growth" in faculty members' use of the software, says Allen Schmoock, the chief information officer. This semester, 90 percent of Albertson students are enrolled in one or more courses for which a professor has created a course site in Blackboard. Some professors add a lot of course materials and use many of the Web-site features, such as e-mail, online discussion, and the electronic drop box for student papers. Others might use a course site only to post a course description and syllabus. "Seventy-five percent of our faculty are using it for at least one course," Mr. Schmoock says, and 60 percent of the 385 courses during the current semester have a presence in Blackboard. "The faculty have really taken hold of this and run with it." Such swift acceptance of new technology has surprised even Mr. Schmoock, who says the adjustment has been mostly, though not entirely, painless. For faculty members creating course Web sites, the process can be a bit awkward, says Elizabeth Wakeman, an associate professor of philosphy at Albertson. "There are lots of links you have to go through to get what you want done. But the students love it -- it's easy for them," she says. "They can't lose the syllabus, they can check their grades from home, and they always know where they stand." Some professors who Mr. Schmoock says "aren't completely sure what's going on behind the curtain" still don't trust the technology enough to post students' grades online. Mr. Schmoock also took some heat from faculty members when the college recently upgraded the course-management system without adding sufficient memory to the server that was running the software. When faculty members couldn't gain access to the system at all times, they complained. Albertson's server problems are fixed now, Mr. Schmoock adds, and the Blackboard system has "really dovetailed nicely" with the college's wireless laptop program. The University of Alberta has about 1,600 full-time faculty members, and nearly 1,000 of them use WebCT in one or more of their courses. The faculty members and students now rely to such a degree on the course-management system that university technicians have only two days each year on which they can take the system down for maintenance. "The best thing we have as a marketing tool are the students themselves," says Susan L. Stein, the university's WebCT administrator. At some institutions, computing officials have used more aggressive strategies to introduce the technology and win acceptance for it. At Princeton University, 100 percent of the courses have Web sites, which some professors use more than others, says Serge J. Goldstein, director of academic services in the office of information-technology services. But Princeton achieved complete compliance by having academic-technology support-staff members build basic pages for each of the approximately 1,000 courses that the university offers every semester. There may be fewer than 400 courses in which faculty members "are actually adding something of their own beyond what we put in," Mr. Goldstein says. Data Added Automatically Princeton also has gone further than many institutions in automating the process of adding data to the course Web sites. Princeton extracts course information from its PeopleSoft student-information system and automatically creates and updates a thousand course rosters within the course-management system. Princeton staff members also create software in-house that automatically pulls other useful information into the course Web sites. For instance, when a faculty member puts course material into the university library's electronic reserve-reading system, the material automatically appears in the appropriate course Web site. "Anywhere that we can find material in digital form, we try to integrate it into the courseware, so that faculty don't have to enter the data twice," Mr. Goldstein says. Such features have made course-management systems exceptional productivity tools for handling the administrative tasks of teaching, says Michigan's Mr. Berger. "What has really surprised us is that the productivity has been realized, not only by the faculty members, but even more by the students." Students, he adds, have "more and more that they've got to learn in less and less time, and so they benefit from having their learning environment be organized." Neither WebCT nor Blackboard was originally meant to be a pedagogical tool, Mr. Berger says, and indeed some technologically ambitious professors have found them lacking for that reason. Jeffrey Weiss, a professor of economics at the City University of New York's Bernard M. Baruch College, says he cannot get his Java programs to work within Baruch's Blackboard system. "Blackboard is very multimedia-unfriendly," he says. Nonetheless, by handling some of a professor's more onerous administrative tasks, the new systems can have a beneficial effect on teaching and learning. "I've been able to spend more time focusing on the kind of things I like to focus on in class, and less on administrivia," says Mr. Berger, who teaches science and technology education courses at Michigan. When colleges introduce course-management systems, they may see pedagogical gains because professors often have to redesign their courses before they can put them online, says Diane J. Davis, director of the Center for Instructional Development & Distance Education at the University of Pittsburgh. "That process alone leads to increased quality," she says. 'A Nice Way to Teach' But many academic administrators and professors say they are only beginning to look into ways that course-management systems might alter or improve classroom teaching. Some of them are still reluctant to make any pedagogical claims for the systems. At Cincinnati, Mr. Siff says that some faculty members are putting their lecture notes in Blackboard and making the notes available in advance of their lectures. "I'm not sure I'd glorify that as pedagogy, but it's a nice way to teach," Mr. Siff says. He says he also sees value in videotaping professors' lectures and making the lectures available for students to review within a course-management system, which some professors are attempting to do. "How many people would have passed calculus, even advanced calculus," he asks, "had they been able to see the material over and over and over again?" Margaret A. McKenna, the president of Lesley University, in Cambridge, Mass., says she is "completely and totally enthusiastic" about using a course-management system instead of, for example, photocopying a syllabus 300 times. But the current systems have too many limitations to be reliable course-delivery systems, she says, adding: "The architecture is not yet robust enough to support the kind of teaching that we're committed to." She also says technology could be used to give professors more information about how their students learn -- by capturing how an individual student highlighted the text of an online reading assignment, for example. Lesley University offers an extensive array of classroom and online graduate-education programs for teachers. Many of its professors who use sophisticated Web tools -- Dreamweaver, Drumbeat, and others -- insist on building their course Web sites outside of the course-management system. For those professors, the course-management system is useful, at best, for making assignments and announcements or for setting up a discussion forum online, says George Blakeslee, a professor of education at Lesley. "They don't do much instruction with it," he says. Another problem is that, because the systems are still immature, even faculty members who are technologically advanced find it easier to put a course into a course-management system than to take one out. "Let's say a faculty member wanted to go to another institution, which has a different course-management system," says Harry R. Matthews, director of mediaworks in the Office of Information & Educational Technology at the University of California at Davis. "It would be more or less impossible to take the course with them if they wanted to do that. You can get the files out, but you don't have any of the [course] organization." Davis is evaluating WebCT. 'The Real Killer App' But some educators say that the evolution of course-management systems could change all of that. Mr. Berger, at Michigan, describes today's systems as precursors of what he calls "the real killer app" for higher education. Many pieces of it exist already, he says -- courseware, portal software, and electronic portfolios, for example. A standard Web language like XML will be an essential component of any future system capable of handling "all of the exotic data sources" that students and faculty members need for learning and research, he says. And whatever the current faults of WebCT and Blackboard, many academic administrators say they are preferable to homegrown systems. As other research universities have done -- George Washington University, Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis, Michigan, and the University of California at Davis, among others -- Princeton developed its own course-management system, beginning in 1997. Two years later, the university decided to abandon its homegrown system in favor of Blackboard. "The problem with homegrown systems is you typically have one or two staff people who know how the system works, and those people might leave or decide to do something else," Mr. Goldstein says. In the fall of 1999, when Princeton switched to Blackboard, "it was for all the classic reasons why you use a vendor's product," he adds. "We didn't have the staff to maintain and improve the homegrown system, and to keep it current and powerful enough for our faculty." But Mr. Goldstein says he would prefer to see vendors like WebCT and Blackboard go a step beyond sharing their proprietary building blocks, as they are beginning to do. Ideally, he says, WebCT, Blackboard, and other academic-software companies would adopt some or all of the nonproprietary technical standards that are being developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, and others as part of the Open Knowledge Initiative, a research program to develop online teaching technologies and course materials. "It would be nice, because then a company or a university wouldn't have to write [both] a Blackboard version of something and a WebCT version of something," Mr. Goldstein says. Rather, an institution could create online-teaching materials and know that they would work in any course-management system. It's a scenario that "would give us pretty much everything we want -- an open-standards-based system that's vendor-supported," he says. Both Blackboard and WebCT say that, in their own ways, they are moving toward more open standards. "In academia, you need a flexible environment," says Carol A. Vallone, WebCT's president and chief executive officer. Ms. Vallone says the company is making fundamental changes in WebCT that will make it more useful as a Web database for all types of digital content, including textbook materials from most of the major textbook publishers, in addition to professors' own research. "What faculty are really interested in," she says, "is a way to mix and match everything -- even from different publishers." Data on Student Use In the next generation of WebCT, a new internal structure will make this possible, Ms. Vallone says. All digital course materials will be stored within a virtual library from which professors -- by pointing and clicking a mouse -- can extract materials and organize them into a course. "One of the appeals of WebCT is the fact you can track how the students are doing, how they are learning, what pathways they are taking," Ms. Vallone adds. Course-management systems collect data about how and when students use the systems, though few faculty members or administrators say they have found such data to be especially useful. One educator says he would feel "sneaky" if, without telling the students, he were to use the system statistics for checking up on them to see, for instance, who had been doing the course readings and who had not. Others say they have largely ignored the statistics gathered by the current systems because the data lack sophistication. "That's one of the areas where I think the systems will improve, and we're anxious to see some improvement," says Mr. Goldstein. Officials of both WebCT and Blackboard say their next software releases -- WebCT Cobalt and Blackboard 6 -- will have more sophisticated data-analysis and reporting features. Ms. McKenna, at Lesley, says it is apparent to her that WebCT and Blackboard were developed, for the most part, "by engineers and technology folks, not by educators." To be more useful, she says, the systems should be capable of continually assessing what students already know, what they don't know, and what they are interested in. "If you're a really good teacher, what you're doing when you go in a classroom is adapting your teaching to where the class is and where individual students are," Ms. McKenna says. It follows that professors in the classroom can always use more data to show them what their students need, she says. Her colleague, Mr. Blakeslee, says: "We're a critical consumer." But he adds that "imperfect as the present versions are, they are showing promise." 
http://chronicle.com Section: Information Technology Page: A25
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Copyright © 2001 by The Chronicle of Higher Education