When I first read one of the recent e-Strategy Updates at UBC with the title starting with “A Better Vista…” I thought it was announcing the computer’s operating system upgrade to Microsoft’s latest operating system Windows Vista. But instead something, much more useful than Windows Vista, was to be upgraded: WebCT (the “learning management system” at UBC). In this term, three (and a half) of my classes had a WebCT homepage, and I found it very useful to be able to get lecture outlines, practice exams, post on the bulletin board, and other helpful material, but there was only one problem:
That yellow box saying “Performance May be Slower Due to Higher Usage” showed up regularly during the evening hours when everyone is on trying to get on there to do one thing or another. During the daytime during these final exams days, this message is almost constantly there (or on “Normal usage,” but never saying “Low usage” unless you go on at 3am in the morning)
Hopefully this WebCT Vista will be much more powerful than the existing WebCT and will be able to handle almost a thousand of us users at one time, so it won’t take a minute to load each page anymore.
Side note: Did you know WebCT was originally created by a UBC Computer Science faculty member?
Here in Faculty of Computing and Electrical Engineering in Zagreb, Croatia, we’re using WebCT for one class, Management in Engineering. And WebCT has demonstrated itself as being the least intuitive e-learning system I’ve used to date. It can be done so much better, and as a PHP coder, I’m sure you’ll agree.