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.

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