Integrated Course Management Software

Defined:

Integrated application suites refer to applications that provide several tools in one package. They often contain specific tools designed for each of three user groups: learners, instructors, and technical administrators. In other words, Integrated applications often have features that allow for not only creation of course material, but also manipulation, modification, control, backup, support of data, student records, and possibly graded material.

Course Management is the process of developing, managing, and delivering information related to a specific course, e.g., Chemistry 100. Course/Classroom Management Systems are applications, processes, and their requisite infrastructure designed to facilitate Course Management. There are a few commercially available instructional software applications for creating and managing Web-based asynchronous and/or synchronous course content. These software applications empower the educational community to create new teaching-learning environments, often without the need to know how to write HTML.

What it is NOT:

An analogy to text processing helps us understand the differences among categories of software related to web based instructional technology. With text processing software, there are categories such basic text editors, word processors and desktop publishers. With instructional software there are categories such as course management, authoring and collaboration.

Just as with the text processing software, there are functional overlaps among software packages within each instructional software category and between categories.

The myths of Web-based education

What can you expect to find? 

The Online Syllabus

An online syllabus provides the instructor with a way to change course material easily, and the student with a complete and up-to-date picture of the course requirements. The format need not (and probably should not) duplicate the print version. Hypertext links to sample relevant disciplinary web sites may be helpful in giving students (and also prospective students) a sense of the disciplinary context for the course. Syllabus information includes items such as policies and objectives, required texts, evaluation and assessments, web links, schedules and announcements.

Personal Home Pages

Personal home pages can be used to foster the sense that the class is not just a collection of isolated individuals but a community of learners who can profit from interacting with one another. Home pages encourage students to learn about each other so as to encourage contact and mutual interests.

Interactivity

Adding discussion forums and chat sessions to your online course is a common way to add an interactive component to a web-based course. There are many implementations of bulletin board and chat session software to choose from. A second method of interactivity is, of course, e-mail. It's a good practice to have an online list of the e-mail addresses of all registered students, the professor, and teaching assistants.

Assignments

The web page listings of homework assignments, upcoming events and exams can be more interactive than the familiar print counterparts. If some homework assignments, for example, are based on online materials, they can be directly linked to the class schedule.

Announcements

To be effective, announcements need to be read; for that to happen, students need to know when a new announcement has been posted. Alert sounds or perhaps a blinking link added to a page can let students know of new announcements, or perhaps, even a mass e-mail to all students in the course.

Testing

Online drill or practice testing can be used to reinforce material, even if the results are not used as part of a grade. Reading comprehension questions, for example, in short answer or multiple choice formats can provide students with an assessment of their level of understanding of text.

Course Management

Software should be available to add or delete students from the course, assign user Ids and passwords, create or edit home pages, and manage any open discussion groups. In addition, some packages include an integrated student gradebook

Content

Perhaps the most difficult part of developing a web-based course is creating the online content. You can begin by transferring your basic lecture materials to the web and integrating media such as sound, images, and video. Remember, to experiment with incorporating some of the new web-based learning paradigms described above. Some packages havean integrated HTML editor. Some require the Instructor to generate HTML outside of the course management tool.

Security

The option to protect the course (material or discussions or both) exisits in all course mangement packages.

A word about the new publishing environment

Using the Web for teaching involves a lot more than merely converting lecture notes into Web pages.

On the visual level the differing characteristics of the media require quite different formatting of textual material.

On the organisational level, breaking of classroom sessions and concurrent teaching will require much greater flexibility on the part of the bureaucracy and the Instructor.

Simply transcribing lectures to text will result in high drop-out rates and unhappy students.

Advantages of using Integrated Applications

Structure

Integrated application present a common stucture, look, and feel to an online course. Returning students see a familar layout and are less inclined to need help navigating.

Powerful Tools

Most packages include integrated student management, grading, and/or quiz and test generation facilities.

Supportability

It is much easier for a technical staff to support both instructors and students when a common applicaton is used. In addition, most of these tools require only a web browser on the student end to access the course.

 

Some things to keep in mind when evaluating integrated software applications...

• Make sure the application is available on the platform you institution is using.
• Are the client-side requirements reasonable?
• There is tremendous variation in both the initial charge for the software as well as on-going costs per student, per course, and/or for maintenance.
• Is there a limt to the number of simultaneous connections the softwarer can support?
• Is the software still being actively developed?

Disadvantages of using Integrated Applications

Structure

If the interface provided by the Integraded package is awkward, then both students and instructors will have difficulty.

Inflexible

Instructors may be locked-in to using tools that may not be the best because they need some other features provided by the package.

Cost

Purchase of an Integrated package can be costly, and often the decision is removed from instructors to technical support individuals based on ease of installation and maintenance.

Top Class - An integrated virtual classroom with content creation and management capabilities as well as people management functions.

Platform: WinNT, Win 95, Linux, Solaris, and Mac

Pricing:

Academic Pricing (5/8/97)   Only for accredited academic institutions (K-12, Colleges and Universities)

Demo Course

WebCT -WebCT also provides a wide variety of tools and features that can be added to a course. Examples of tools include a conferencing system, on-line chat, student progress tracking, group project organization, student self-evaluation, grade maintenance and distribution, access control, navigation tools, auto-marked quizzes, electronic mail, automatic index generation, course calendar, student homepages, course content searches and more.

Platform: WinNT, Unix

Pricing

Demo Course

Lotus Learning Space - Designed around five database modules to include, Scheduling (course materials, exercises, quizzes), MediaCenter (audio/video and text presentations as well as extranal sources), CourseRoom (collaborative environment), Profiles (information about students and instructor), and the Assessment Manager (testing, feedback, and gradebook facilities).

Platform: Domino

Pricing is customized to the institution.

Demo Course

(ramage demo)

VCI - The VCI will give professors the ability to create their own class homepages from scratch without the bother of coding html or using complicated file transfer methods. Professors will be given secure directories which will contain simple forms. These forms will automatically generate pages for their lectures, post announcements to a bulletin board, generate hotlists for each class, post assignments to an assignment page, and generate e-mail messages to the entire class at the professor's discretion. Furthermore, there will be administrative control of the class web pages through forms. This will automate the class web page production process while giving much greater control to the professors. To see an example of what the forms will look like, see the attached web pages.

Not commercially available

Demo Course and VCI

Web Course in a Box - Web Course in a Box (WCB) is an integrated approach to enabling instructors with minimal technical expertise to create and manage Web pages for a course, including the ability to:

Faculty fill in text-based forms using Netscape browsers, version 2.0 and above. Cut and Paste techniques are often used to enter information directly from syllabi produced with word processors. No knowledge of HTML is required. Note: because of the incomplete support of javascript by Internet Explorer 3.0 and below, faculty cannot use Microsoft’s Internet Explorer to create pages. IE 4.0 has not been tested.

Once data is entered into a form and a submit button is clicked, WCB automatically creates course pages on the University's web server. Pages are immediately displayed to facilitate instructor editing.

Students can view and interact with WCB course pages using either Netscape, version 2 or above or IE, version 3 or above. Browsers must be properly configured for email and any necessary helper applications. Note: the “email to all students” feature only works with Netscape browsers.

• Create course and faculty/student home pages without knowing HTML
• Create threaded discussion forums with file attachments and archiving
• Upload content from instructor's PC/Mac and manage links to all pages
• Manage student access to pages; batch upload of student registration data
• Create interactive quizzes and tests
• Construct Lesson Pages containing elements such as graphics, text, headers, quizzes, discussion forums and linked files or Web sites.
• Create on-line syllabus, class schedule, and announcements

Platorm: WinNT, Unix, and Mac

Pricing:  Free

One year of support = $1000.00

Demo Course

(guest  visitor)

Nicenet

The ICA is designed for post-secondary and secondary classrooms, distance learning and collaborative academic projects, though anyone who finds it useful is free and welcome to use it. The ICA runs on Nicenet's server and requires any web browser running on any platform and an Internet connection - there is no software to download and no server to configure. The ICA was intentionally designed as a low graphics environment to decrease the load time of each page. The queries used to fill the site with class-specific data take less than a second. A fully dynamic site, the ICA is customized at two different levels: 1.) the user and 2.) the class. Anyone can set up a class in minutes and allow others to join. After login, users are presented with a "heads-up" display of class resources.

Pricing:  Free

Platform:  A web browser.

Your Username: trramage
Your Password: demo
Your Class Key: 028Z6T89

Demo Course