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Re: Seeking advice to fix an app that I have no control over
by cjf (Parson) on Feb 22, 2002 at 00:57 UTC
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So my question is this. Can I somehow, without stepping on toes, advise the creators on what is wrong, so that it may be fixed?
Assuming you're speaking of this WebCT, the answer is most likely No. As far as I know WebCT is proprietary software (please inform me if I am incorrect), and attempting to fix their buggy software for them wouldn't be the best approach.
Instead, my recommendation is to start an open source project which provides the same functionality. Easier said than done I know, but if you're willing to put work in to improve it, this would be the way to go. Chances are there are many other people dissatisfied with WebCT that would be willing to contribute to the project.
There is also a project on Sourceforge aimed at creating open source tools and utilities for WebCT that may be of interest (and a source of assistance).
Best of luck :)
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This reminds me of the sad story of the old discussion
forums I was on at Infoworld. It had, shall we say, a few
problems. Sight unseen I was able to figure out the likely
causes of their race conditions, forum corruption, etc.
One day after a server move they had a permissions problem
where part of their source was downloadable by anyone. I
took the liberty of downloading it, and posting patches
that removed sad race condition, made the corrupted forums
mostly readable, etc, etc. The powers that be at Infoworld
were not amused, never applied said patches, and kept on
blathering on about rolling
out an "enterprise solution" for the upcoming Y2K problems.
(I offered to do a Y2K port of the existing system to
Apache on Linux for them for nominal cost. This was
ignored. As was my flat-out statement that I would never
use their replacement forum system. As was an internal
reimplementation, an offer of a rewrite to run on OS/2, and
so on and so forth.)
The long and short of it was that no amount of good will on
my part was sufficient to get through the layers of CYA.
As a result InfoWorld Electric (ie IWE) wound up rolling out
a PoS set of forums as a Y2K solution. After I (and others)
decided never to post there, the community that they had
developed renamed itself IWETHEY, and moved. (The latest
incarnation resides at
zIWETHEY.)
And what happened to Infoworld? Well they survived, their
"enterprise" forum system fell apart, their current forums
are far worse than what they had (or what multiple people
were willing to give them), and after several rounds of
layoffs, the PhBs who originally screwed things up are no
longer there. So yes, their stupidity cost them.
But, aside from my learning a lot of cynicism about what it
means when PhBs want an "enterprise system", all of my
energy trying to get them to use something better was just
wasted. If the "powers that be" don't want to hear it, they
aren't about to. And there isn't a lot you can do about it.
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(shockme) Re: Seeking advice to fix an app that I have no control over
by shockme (Chaplain) on Feb 22, 2002 at 02:53 UTC
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This is way off topic and in no way related to any questions or issues you raise (hi Ovid!), but....
I recently inherited a WebCT server. It's at least one release out-of-date, and is unequivocally reliant on Perl v5.05. I discovered this when I upgraded Perl to v5.6.1. Within 5 minutes of the upgrade the phone calls (aka complaints) came pouring in. There was much wailing and nashing of teeth. Of course, no one thought to ask me what happened, because I'd only been on the job for about 2 weeks and, of course, couldn't possibly know what the problem might be.
Fortunately, the server runs RedHat, so Perl lives in /usr/bin. I had performed a default v5.6.1 install, so it was in /usr/local/bin. I removed /usr/bin/perl and set up a symbolic link to /usr/local/bin/perl. Correcting the problem was as easy as downloading the v5.05 RPM and reinstalling it.
Now, WebCT uses /usr/bin/perl and everything else on that server points to /usr/local/bin/perl. While I'd like to upgrade WebCT (solely for the purpose of running only one version of Perl), everyone is currently happy and I'm still amazed that no one pinpointed me as the sole point of failure on the whole gig.
Stupid and lucky. That's me.
If things get any worse, I'll have to ask you to stop helping me. | [reply] |
Re: Seeking advice to fix an app that I have no control over
by dorko (Prior) on Feb 22, 2002 at 10:04 UTC
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E-Bitch,
I used to administer a WebCT installation. At the time it was one of the biggest in the world. (1,200+ course accounts and 30,000+ user accounts.) Later, I worked for WebCT proper.
- Down almost constantly.
WebCT can be rock solid, but we ran it on very beefy Sun hardware and Solaris as the OS. It was bullet proof. Our only down times were network issues; cut fibers mostly, once on campus, once in Reseach Park adjoining campus, and once in downtown Orlando. If you were on campus, you could still get to the server. UPDATE: Is Colorado State running WebCT on Windows?(I hate to sound like I'm bashing Windows, but WebCT is more stable on *nix...) I just found out that CSU is indeed running WebCT on Unix...
You'd be suprised to hear that many institutions consider WebCT mission critical. Often times, it is understood to be just as import as payroll systems and campus wide email. And that makes sense - if your school is offering courses with required on-line components and those components aren't available to the students, that's the equivalent of the school not being able to hold classes in classrooms due to maintence issues (no blackboards, no desks/chairs, no running water in classroom buildings, no HVAC, no restrooms, etc)
For what it's worth, the WebCT admins at CSU (Jamie Bethel and Craig Spooner) are both underpaid and overworked. They both have a good reputation in the on-line WebCT community.
- ...looks like it was intended for one class, and was bodgered and grew into what it is today.
Kudos to you on this point, you are absolutely correct. You hit the nail on the head here. Murray Goldberg developed it to augment the computer science courses he was teaching in 1995 / 1996. He was doing the right thing at the right time in the right way and it took off like gang busters - literally.
- I know it uses a database on the backend, but I've never seen it, nor know what the schema looks like.
No, it doesn't. You'd like to thing it does, but it doesn't. Actually, you're correct if you call a collection of flat files and DBM's a database. You'd have to look at the way WebCT does things to understand what I'm saying. There really isn't a schema. WebCT in current production versions uses a database like a combination of the Yellow Pages from the phone book and your mother's recipes can be thought of as a database. WebCT's "database" is certainly not object oriented, just relational enough to do what it needs to do, and any sort of DB management system is integral to the programming and not a separate system. If you still want to call it a database, it is by no means normalized.
I said Murray was doing it the right way, because in 1996, no higher education administrator in thier right mind would have paid for a DBA to run a database for on-line learning. It just wouldn't have happened. The key to WebCT's success (and market share) was that it was easy to install out of the box onto a machine of modest proportions by someone with modest technical skills. Often times, WebCT was installed by a faculty member on "spare" hardware without the knowledge of the administration or networking/computer systems staff.
- ... scored 100%, and the system lost the record.
As for your quiz problems, I've heard of WebCT "losing my score" and "changing my answers" on and off for four years. Trying to trouble shoot, I've taken quizzes myself and watched affected students take (and re-take) quizzes. I've watched them in my office using my machine, in the computer labs, and even at their homes on their own PC. I even had a cadre of part-time student employees take a bunch of quizzes looking for this problem. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, I'm saying I've never seen it happen nor have I ever seen anyone who had it happen to them recreate it, and I've tried pretty hard. In all fairness, there is an issue of resizing browsers with Netscape, but at best that will affect a single answer. If you can figure it out, please let me know.
If your really interested in WebCT,
webct-admin-request@lists.sourceforge.net (subscribe at https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/webct-admin) is a good list as is webct-users-digest@webct.com (Majordomo). The WebCT SourceForge site will be pretty much useless to a student. Most of the scripts there are for versions 1.x and 2.x; although there is some good information about adding FrontPage Extension to a WebCT server. I'm guessing CSU is running 3.x.
BTW, the last I heard, the next version of WebCT (a.k.a. Colbalt/Vista/4.0) is being re-written from the ground up. Rather than Perl, it'll be J2EE Java serlets running on top of Oracle 9i.
Cheers!
Brent
-- Yeah, I'm a Delt. | [reply] |
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WebCT allows for this kind of tracking. (Although not independent of WebCT as you suggest.) Instructors can view a quiz session history from initial load to final submission for grading, including each (re-)submission of an individual answer (each question is it's own HTML form...), each with a time stamp. It creates a nice chronological view of a quiz attempt. Looking at this history, you can even tell if a student likes to answer all the question on the quiz and then go back and correct their possible mistakes; or work on each question one at a time until they think they've got it right before proceding to the next question. You could even tell that some students would print the quiz, work it out on paper, and then "batch input" the answers back into WebCT.
On a side note, WebCT will also calculate the upper quartile, lower quartile, discrimination, standard deviation, and mean for questions. Hopefully instructors use this information to tell when they've got a bum question, but I suspect few know this type of analysis is available to them.
Additionally, the instructor can view individual student statistics for page views of course content, a chronological list of pages hit in WebCT, length of time spent on pages, messages read in the bulletin board system.
Furthermore, WebCT collates all that per student data and will provide averages across all students. It even provides for longitudinal analysis across semesters.
I agree whole heartedly about the privacy issues. I think most students would freak if they saw the depth of statistics WebCT tracks.
If I ever had a wiff of something not jiving with the data I had available, I would have hit up our networking staff for something like you suggest to get data from outside of WebCT. (BTW, the network people at my institution were great! Their attitude was "We're here to help you do what you want to do." When was the last time you've heard networking / systems admin. people say that?) It was a pleasure to work with them.
Cheers!
Brent
-- Yeah, I'm a Delt.
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Well, I stand corrected. I naively assumed that it was running on a database. But good to hear that it will port over to Oracle 9i eventually. Unfortunately, the timeline that this will occur on is outside of my timeline at this university. And I'm wondering why the switch to J2EE? CGIs can be just as good (if not better) at the same task, and since they have already started with them... wouldnt it be prudent to continue?
Thanks for all the help / Advice!
_________________________________________
E-Bitch
Tempora Mutantur Nos et Mutamur in Illis
"The Times are Changed Even as We are Changed in Them"
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