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Wednesday, 14 July 2004: 4:15 PM-5:00 PM | |||
Northern A-3 (Walt Disney World Dolphin Hotel) | |||
J-11: Migrating to WebCT from a FrontPage Course Environment | |||
| Detailed Description: | The session shares lessons learned in migrating to WebCT from a FrontPage web development environment. The session focuses on helping instructors who have prior hypermedia experiences and legacy materials developed in FrontPage to migrate to WebCT and explore instructional applications that can be supported by the technical capabilities of WebCT. Three types of professional development activities are discussed: preliminary training, just-in-time consultation and tutorials, and faculty insight sharing. | ||
| Presentation Format: | Showcase | ||
| Topic: | Empowering educators: Professional development models and methods | ||
| Target Audience: | Course Designers, Faculty and Other Instructors, E-learning Managers | ||
| Appropriate Audience Level: | Beginning or new users of WebCT, Experienced WebCT users | ||
| Abstract Text: | The session discusses lessons learned by Dakota State University in migrating to WebCT from a hybrid combination of web course tools, with FrontPage as the primary web development tool. The topics include: (a) conducting a needs analysis and anticipating issues to address in migrating to WebCT, (b) getting the support team ready, (c) encouraging faculty to embrace WebCT by offering them preliminary training and showing them the course functions available in WebCT, but not in FrontPage, (d) helping instructors migrate course content to WebCT with necessary content modification and restructuring, (e) providing just-in-time consultation and individual tutorials to address issues as they arise, and (f) organizing faculty insight sharing sessions to explore pedagogical possibilities that can be supported by the technical capabilities of WebCT. Key issues to address during the migration process include: (a) maintaining and adjusting navigation structure in transferring legacy course materials to WebCT, (b) helping instructors functionally distinguish the course organization components in WebCT and make the components complement one another in building course navigation scheme, (c) helping instructors to utilize the management functions of WebCT to promote both collaborative and individualized learning, and (d) keeping faculty aware of the authoring tasks that are often taken as given in FrontPage, but need to be performed with caution or adaptation in WebCT. Important lessons learned from the migration process include: (a) proactive guidance and training are better than reactive trouble-shooting in saving time and avoiding frustration, (b) workshops should have primary focus on instructional applications of the WebCT tools rather than elaborate on technical details, and (c) faculty can often benefit more from each other than from technical support staff in exploring instructional applications using the tools in WebCT. | ||
| Session Leader: | Haomin Wang Dakota State University | ||
| Co-Presenter: | Mingming Shao Dakota State University | ||
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