0.4 Discussion  (Page 4/23)

I had a discussion with our on campus tech support person who helps with all our WebCT stuff, and I was so excited, it’s so wonderful, it goes with the book, and I said, “They can get the book for a little less,” and then she said, “I’m going to tell you something right now. I didn’t hear this conversation. I didn’t hear it. Because the students would have to pay – okay, if I were to import the Dot.learn into WebCT, however that’s done, the school’s going to charge the students more.”

This situation was a hot button for the university technology support staff trained specifically in the campus-wide course management system. When faced with helping instructors using a different system, usually one produced by a textbook publisher, the support staff was frustrated at not being prepared to deal with the problems encountered. As demonstrated in Carrie’s quotation above, the technology expert felt her ability to perform was undermined by instructor’s adoption of the new software. In this instance, Carrie went back later and worked out a compromise which entailed putting Online Day as a link within the WebCT course, and not using all the functionality.

Ed found himself in a position similar to Carrie’s. Although Ed had used Online Day in the two previous semesters, the third semester he was required to teach his course with Blackboard. He dealt with the conflict by embedding a link to the Online Day materials within the Blackboard interface. Ed had to resort to this method to be in compliance with university policy, but it seemed to hinder the students in finding the Online Day resources. When I asked Ed about the biggest problem he encountered during the semester, he responded, “I think just kids not knowing how to get into Online Day. We get into Online Day kind of through the back door in the sense that we do have it now on Blackboard.” Embedding the link to Online Day under a layer of Blackboard navigation may have added to the difficulty of the course for some of the students. Ed indicated that he experienced more difficulty than in previous semesters helping the students learn to use the technology. The students asked repeatedly for him to reopen the online tests beyond the allotted time frame.

It seems like I had to kind of keep going back and nurse some of them along. It’s like, come on, you know, I’m not going to open any more for you again, stop doing this. Some would get behind. I had two students that failed. I’ve not had that before.

Another way of dealing with the requirement to use the campus-wide system was to simply create and maintain two different websites for the course. Lyle and Mark both tried this approach. Lyle had difficulty deciding what to put on which website in order for the students to be able to distinguish between the two. Mark dealt with the ambiguity by creating two identical sites, but eventually stopped maintaining the Online Day website. The clash of the two course management systems created some of the most serious problems for the instructors and students using Online Day, which will be discussed in greater detail later in the chapter.