This page is a collection of references for use by (and contributed by) colleagues who are using the Blackboard / WebCT systems, especially those at the beginning of the learning curve in using the systems.

Choose a heading:
   New Links
   Articles
   Tutorials for Educators
   Resources for Educators (includes Bb-related podcasts)
   Student Tutorials & Resources

Blackboard Sync for Facebook:
"...delivers Blackboard course information and updates through the Facebook interface
to keep students in touch and engaged with their academic studies."
See also this explanatory blog posting by Karen Gage. 05/19/08

Educator Central: Created for Bb's K-12 Clients:
"Made for districts wanting to manage and evaluate professional development activities,
expand professional learning opportunities, and build powerful communities of practice."

educate / innovate: "...the Blackboard blog about the convergence of education and technology.
A forum to generate discussion about the topics, news,
and latest trends impacting e-Learning and campus service offerings;
provide insight about how technology can enable educational innovations for both."

Bravo: "...a new way...to share information, insights, and experiences.

New Links:

What's new & coming soon? See this blog post written by Niall Sclater, a Moodle proponent who attended the Spring '08 Bb European Conference. 05/14/08

RELEASE 8.0 for the Bb Academic Suite (for people currently using the Bb Learning System Basic or Enterprise systems).This link will directly open a video/audio introduction, originally presented in a webinar on 12/17/07. Bb Support says, "This is a comprehensive webinar recording that goes over the new benefits for this release. The run time is only 30 minutes and we would highly recommend viewing this webinar prior to upgrading to Release 8.0." 3/31/08

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Articles

Despite Alternatives, Blackboard will stay: Dr. Allen Futrell, U. of Louisville, compares his experiences with Moodle and Blackboard. 03/04/08

Designing Kick Butt Quality Online Courses: [you can log in to this FREE course, hosted inside Blackboard. Username bbworld07, password bbworld07] "How do you create courses that capture students' attention and direct them through the learning process? How do you merge clean, accessible design with sound pedagogical principles? This workshop provides tools and resources you can use to up the quality of your online courses and improve the online experience for your learners." 01/05/08

Blackboard & Google become partners in search 'appliances': Today's article from Blackboard Media Center. 11/02/06

Aperto eLearning Solutions: "...focuses on integrating innovative Open Source technologies with commercial learning management systems (LMS), such as WebCT and Blackboard. Aperto was created by WebCT co-founder Sasan Salari, who left WebCT in January 2006 after eleven years. Sasan saw a significant interest by higher- and further-education institutions to embrace the use of new community-building technologies in conjunction with their LMS." Aperto has now partnered with Elgg (see next item here). 07/30/06

ELGG Learning Landscape: This system was mentioned by Kevin Reeve as one way of including a blogging tool in a course; Elgg is one of the WebCT powerlinks. "Elgg is a hybrid of weblogging, e-portfolios and social networking. It is hoped this combination of features will provide an engaging environment for learners to create their own learning space and then connect to others, forming online communities of learning. ... There are two options to get an Elgg account. You can register for an individual account hosted by Elgg or you can take the system and install it on your own server. Elgg is an open source application. ... Elgg has been developed to serve as a stand alone personal learning landscape or as a complimentary addition to existing learning environments. Elgg has been developed to serve as a stand alone personal learning landscape or as a complimentary addition to existing learning environments. The emphasis with Elgg is very much on the learner." 04/14/06

ALSO: In a WebCT forum posting, Sasan Salari offers this: "Further to Kevin's message regarding Elgg and WebCT, you might also want to have a look at the Flash demo that I created, which shows the integration and some of the Elgg capabilities."

Why WebCT? Laura Little has assembled a list of independent institutions (not part of WebCT the company) who have compared WebCT with other management systems and chosen WebCT.

Review Analysis of WebCT, current to March 02. As part of a website devoted to "helping educators evaluate and select online delivery software", this page for WebCT analysis is chock full of information for those considering purchasing it. Reviews everything from design and pedagogy to cost.

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Tutorials for Educators

CE6 Orientation Center: "View these quick demonstrations on easy course preparation, efficient course management, and innovative teaching and learning tools."

CE6 Key Features: (demos)

Intro to CE6 (for faculty & students): from Cal State San Marcos

YouTube Blackboard TV: "BlackboardTV (or "BbTV") helps e-Learning innovators -- designers, instructors, students -- visualize online teaching and learning. The education and technology videos collected in the playlists on this channel enable users throughout the global Blackboard community to see, and learn from, e-Learning innovations in K-12 schools, higher education institutions and organizations." See also YouTube BlackboardK12. 03/02/08

Blackboard Support & Resources for Faculty: Grand Rapids Community College has a helpful site for their own faculty, but there are items there that could be useful to any of us. For example, check their Tips, Tutorials & Help (right-side column of the page), their Faculty Tip Sheets and Student Tip Sheets, and their Quick Tutorials (these are for course management for Blackboard Academic Suite). 08/23/07

Blackboard For Dummies: A book (at Amazon.com) for Blackboard Learning System 7. 08/223/07

Blackboard Vista tutorials: Utah State has a great selection of software tutorials, and these appear among them. Use the drop-menu lists to select what you need.

WebCT Vista Training Videos: Monash University

WebCT Vista 3 Tutorials for students: From U. of Houston-Victoria

Vista 4 Training tutorials: From U. of Alberta

WebCT Tips by Dick Evans: " have been using WebCT since the 1990's at Rhode Island College. We are currently on release 4.1, but are testing release 6. As questions arise and I find a solution, I write a White Paper for faculty reference. This blog describes some of those papers and links to them on my college Web site." 05/22/07

Open Source Project: An LCMS Alternative -- Moodle: My link is to EdTechPost's description of a funded research project wherein "6 institutions have done pioneering working to investigate the viability of Moodle as an alternative, and have made the resulting reports available for all to see. The project was funded by ... BCcampus." What grabbed my attention was that one of the several offerings by the research group is documentation about how to migrate WebCT 4.1 courses to Moodle. 04/09/06

How to get RSS Feeds Into WebCT Courses

• Blog > RSS > WebCT: A detailed and easy to follow how-to from Robin Shapiro. Accompanied by a flash demo of what's described in the tutorial. 07/31/07
• Integrating RSS feeds into WebCT courses: A blog posting from Dr. Jean-Claude Bradley, in which he provides "Jay Bhatt's 15 min presentation on integrating RSS feeds into WebCT courses" in 3 formats: mp3 podcast, screencast, and Powerpoint. 08/16/05
• An "Ask Dr. C" Discussion thread that includes detailed instructions. This person converts the RSS feed information to javascript and then uses that in the course. 10/27/05
• An "Ask Dr. C" Discussion in which users describe how they're adding Blogs/RSS to their courses. 11/12/03

WebCT CE4.1 Orientations: Terrie McAloney (BCcampus) has put together orientations to WebCT CE4.1 for both instructors and students. (Terrie posted this to a BC Online Communities forum with the note: "Please forward to any interested faculty or students for their use.") 06/11/05

• Faculty Orientation: This is an orientation to all the tools of WebCT from the designer/faculty perspective. You can search and print documents on all the tools in WebCT. ID and password are both FacultyWebCT
  
• Student Orientation: ID and password are both StudentWebCT

How to make WebCT 4 CE questions that contain MathML: Steve Corwin, the author of this page, says, "If you know LaTeX, it's not hard to put MathML in WebCT questions and answers reasonably quickly. (It's just hard to find out what works!)  I've posted a page with all I know about it, and the tools you need to do it. Thanks to all whose posts helped me out with this." 05/31/05

WebCT Gradebook ~ Formulas for Calculated Columns: a pdf document with instructions for a few types of calculations from your grade columns. 04/12/04

Chatroom Tutorial in Flash 12/20/03

Flash tutorials for WebCT v4.x: Thanks to Dave Elder for these: breadcrumbs... email tool... action menu... 12/01/03

Instructor's WebCT Walkthrough: "The purpose of this work is to address the need that many have to understand the myriad of functions found within the WebCT tool. ...a Flash-based walkthrough on the use of WebCT from an instructor's standpoint. ...you will be shown how to create a course, then how to set up a course, and then how to use the course tools found within WebCT." 10/30/03

How to get a live newsfeed into your WebCT course: "Incorporating a newsfeed into your WebCT course is a great way to get dynamic, changing content into the password protected environment of WebCT. Potential uses include creating an up to date 'breaking information' news source for your class." See also:

How to get a news feed into your WebCT course

Anders Jacobsen article on Optimizing Movable Type (part 6) - Category XML feeds.

My RSS information & links page in this site.

WebCT Training Materials: Basic and Advanced Topics. A growing set of manuals, very inexpensive for individual purchase, and site licenses available. Scholarly Technology group at New Mexico State University. "Our manuals are for 3.x, standard edition, but since they're covering the basics, are also useable for campus edition. We will be rewriting them this winter for campus edition with an eye to having that version ready by late spring." 11/23/02

Respondus 1.5 users guide: Newly created by Idaho State University's Instructional Technology Resource Center. The guide "...can be reproduced for individual or non-profit use." 12/12/02

On 02/28/02: WebCT announced that WebEQ will be part of their versions 3.7 and later. Now check this out: Using MathML with WebCT: An article by one of the math panel at the 2002 WebCT conference. "This paper will focus on using MathML and will be limited to discussion of the WebEQ plug-in for IE and Netscape and MathPlayer for IE." 07/21/02

A bunch of tutorials from Colorado State U. 09/15/02

QUICKSTART: Includes "Getting Started", "Next Steps" and "Campus Success Stories". Lots of great reference materials in these pages! Separate areas for FACULTY, STUDENTS, & ADMINISTRATORS.

Ultimate WebCT Handbook: Georgia State U's WebCT team has just proudly unveiled this very useful book. You can purchase a hard copy or use some of the online reference material excerpted from it. 12/18/01

HTML Fundamentals for WebCT Users - Created by Dr. Tom Donahue of Active Learning Systems, Inc. Free login access.

HTML for WebCT Users: "Learn HTML in about an hour."(Yup, that's what they claim!)

NCSA's Beginner's Guide to HTML - in case you need it first

Powerpoint - Converting Presentations (U. of N.Texas)

Missouri U. - WebCT Quiz Creation. Covers it all, including grading and reports.

WebCT course development without an internet connection - advice from Bo Lou

WebDAV information, tutorials, etc: New to WebDAV? Want to make it work in your WebCT 3.8+ courses? This links to my new WebDAV resources page. Several tutorials, including how to set it up to work with WebCT, how to set it up on your own operating system (Windows/Mac), and how to set it up in Dreamweaver. 08/28/02

Setting up WebDAV in WebCT: this link is to WebCT's Knowledge Base article with instructions for Windows, Mac OS9, Mac OSX. 10/04/02

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Resources for Educators

Blackboard-Related Podcasts

Podcasting with Blackboard: from Northern Illinois University, How to create a course podcast using Blackboard. 08/29/07

Teaching With Blackboard Podcasts: from Northern Illinois University. 08/29/07

Rod’s Pulse Podcasts: by Dr. Rod Murray, Thomas Jefferson University. 08/29/07

Blackboard Faculty Support Group: Bill Villberg, University of Miami, offers this series of interviews with Blackboard users. 08/29/07

Blackboard Briefing: University of Southampton. Four podcasts from August 2006 with news, interviews, and features about the upgrade to Bb version 7. 08/29/07

How to Podcast in Blackboard 7: by Barbara Knauff, Dartmouth University. 08/29/07

EduGarage: Launched October 23/07, this new website by Blackboard "is the place developers can meet to collaborate, leverage expertise and find all the resources they need to build powerful, successful educational tools." 10/26/07

bFree Blackboard Content Extractor: From the University of N.Carolina: "With bFree you can Open a Blackboard™ archive to browse and preview the course materials; Search for words in titles, descriptions, wikis, forums, and file names; Preview content items automatically; Extract selected materials as an independent web site that mimics the original course; Extract selected materials as plain files and folders. The extracted web site can be put on a web server or even loaded into another online learning system." 10/08/07

Firefox Extension for Ask Dr. C Search Engine: In her blog, Laura Gekeler says: "The WebCT "Ask Dr. C" forum/knowledgebase is still alive and well. And I still use it frequently before responding to questions I'm asked. Nowadays my preferred browser is Firefox (especially for administrative tasks in Blackboard Vista because of the 'stop script' feature). So I installed Henk Schotel's Firefox extension (last updated 11/2006) which searches Ask Dr. C for me, much as a Google toolbar would perform a websearch. To get it, use Firefox to navigate here and click on the Ask Dr C link to install it. It works great!" 09/04/07

BRAVO! Blackboard's latest initiative, "...a new way...to share information, insights, and experiences. Bravo! was started with the idea that we can all benefit and have some fun as we learn more about each other and our real-world experiences with...learning technologies." My title link is to the Bravo! homepage. Each month is a new theme/topic; this month (Aug/Sept 07) it's PODCASTING. 08/29/07

Podcasting Building Blocks for Blackboard: After you link to that page, search for “podcast”. 08/29/07

Tools (several helpful applications): from UBC Arts ISIT: "The e-learning tools listed here are publicly available for academic use, within and outside the University of British Columbia." The tools include a WebCT Discussion Extractor, Timeline tool, Multimedia learning object authoring tool, and more. 05/18/07

Math in WebCT: (this is a link to a section on my Math Resources page.)

Instructional Scenarios Wiki for WebCT Vista: Topics included are Content, Communication, Course Management, Evaluation. Lots of good tips 'n' tricks here! "This site is designed and maintained by the Teaching Technology Services group of Instructional Multimedia Services of McGill University. This wiki describes how to use WebCT Vista to do complex instructional tasks using multiple tools. We (the Teaching Technology Services staff) built this wiki to explore the potential of the technology and to experiment with collaborative group work. These instructional scenarios are meant as a complement to the WebCT Vista manuals and do not duplicate any information from them." 02/05/07

Bitty Browser: I've seen this question frequently: "How can I use RSS in my WebCT course?" Well here's one idea for posting your feed list! They call it a "Picture-in-Picture for the Web". This is SO kewl! I can think of many applications for this "Bitty Browser", from in-course links/feeds to using multiple browser boxes as a website organizing method. Check it out as you think creatively (click on the title of this post). Here's an example -- I used a Bitty Browser to post my list of subscribed feeds on my Resource Site's Acknowledgement page. 04/09/06

WebCT icons: A handy site for downloading full sets. Provided by eLearning@Ed. 05/10/06

Links about WebCT's CE 6   05/01/05

• Orientation Center: Includes demos, a quick-start page for course setup, and full descriptions of key features.
• A PDF of the CE6 hardware requirements
• WebCT's CE6 hardware forum
• WebCT's May '05 newsletter, with CE6 Questions & Answers

Respondus LockDown Browser: "A beta release of Respondus LockDown Browser is now available to academic institutions. The browser locks down the testing environment within WebCT and Blackboard so that students are unable to print, copy, go to another URL, or access other applications. When an assessment is started, students are locked into it until it is submitted for grading. 02/13/06

WebCT Icon set (free shareware): Patricia Delich from City College of San Francisco posted this to the webct users' list: "Our college custom created icons for use in WebCT. Our Graphics Communications Department has made them available for anyone to use. The icons are displayed in black but they come in a variety of colors. To download the color you want, click on it." 03/27/06

Learning Resources for WebCT users: from WVNet Learning & Information Technologies. 10/05/02

WeedExporter: I just saw WeedExporter mentioned as a way to create RSS files. (See this discussion at www.webct.com.) I had a look at the WeedExporter information and see that it doesn't specifically mention RSS feed creation as a purpose. But it can be used to create XML, and its purpose is to "simplify the creation of files containing repetitive sections of Windows Media files metadata." 08/21/05

Vodcasting, Screencasting, or Whatever you'd like to call it, and WebCT: Robin Petterd (the person in the discussion posting mentioned above) created this tutorial about the way he creates videos for students. "A system that allows me to record software demonstrations during face to face sessions with students and then deliver these to students via WebCT and RSS feeds." 09/19/05

WebCT Discussion Extractor Tool: Saving and Exporting WebCT Discussions as Learning Objects: Discussion boards (including WebCT discussion boards) can facilitate rich online student discussions and interactions, and are arguably some of the most effective mediators of online learning out there.…But what happens to these dynamic student-centered interactions, these “mini- knowledgebases” of student learning, once the course is over? View this recording to learn how this tool addresses the problem of re-usability of student interactions in WebCT Discussions, and how it allows an instructor or a student to export a fully threaded discussion object from WebCT for re-use in a wide variety of contexts. Watch the webcast about the tool. The link for using the tool is at the UBC Learning Tools site. 03/12/05

Math Symbols in WebCT Assessments ~ An overview of WebCT 3.7+, WebEQ, MathType, and Respondus: "This paper provides an overview of the three methods [image files, MathML, and WebEQ] as it relates to the assessment tools in WebCT. Special focus will be placed on WebCT (which includes the WebEQ equation editor) and Respondus, a third-party tool that allows users to create WebCT assessments offline." 11/18/04

Scripts for use with WebCT: Created by Joseph Fall, available via WebCT's Ask Dr. C Library. "These scripts centralise some tasks that might otherwise result in duplicate code, thus improving the maintenance of your WebCT course. They include a script to add "interal links" to pages produced by WebCT (Organiser, Modules, Assignment dropboxes, quizes, etc.); along with scripts to add a standard header and footer to content pages. The zip archive contains script.js, and a Word 2000 document describing how to set-up and use the scripts." 10/30/04

CourseGenie: A tip on the WebCT users' list from Ed Hernandez. "There's an application called CourseGenie that exports Word docs as "WebCT HTML" without all the extra tags. It also chunks your docs into several smaller HTML pages depending on your Titles. CG also exports as WebCT IMS packages." Note:CourseGenie can be used as a plugin for MS Word. 12/03/04

WebCT's Services Page: Current Services links include: Technical Solutions, Professional Development, Expanding Usage of WebCT Campus Edition, Hosting Services, Support Services, and Getting Started with WebCT Vista. 09/01/04

VISTA Developers Network  09/01/04

TurnItIn: "Recognized worldwide as the standard in online plagiarism prevention, Turnitin helps educators and students take full advantage of the Internet's educational potential." Powerlinked partner with WebCT for use with WebCT Vista. 05/18/04

Content Packager for IMS (Dreamweaver extension): The WebCT Powerlinks site says this "extension enables faculty to immediately publish course content, such as a syllabus or class assignments, to WebCT Campus Edition and WebCT Vista. This free extension eliminates the need for tedious hand coding of XML describing the content elements and structure. The extension works with WebCT Campus Edition 4.0 and WebCT Vista 2.0." Macromedia's download site for the extension says, "The Content Packager for IMS enables you to take e-learning content, which you develop in Dreamweaver, and produce ready-to-deploy course packages that can be delivered over WebCT Campus Edition 4.0, WebCT Vista 2.1 and other standards-compliant LMS or learning delivery system products." Here's an essential link to an information and instruction page about this tool. 03/04/04

WebCT Communication Notification Utility: (for the Mail and Discussion tools) Free download from Peter Love at NetKnowledgy. Platform(s): WebCT 3.8. "To foster online discussion and encourage students, it is important to reply regularly to their discussions and mail postings. Communication Notification (COMNOT) assists with this by allowing WebCT users to configure and receive email notification of new discussions or mail postings." 02/11/04

NetKnowledgy: "...a small New Zealand based business... established by Peter Love, [who] has strong technical knowledge combined with practical experience in both teaching and the management of online learning systems." As well as offering some free utilities such as the one above, they offer a variety of WebCT related services and software, including: "content development, general consultation, performance investigation, custom software development and installation, student system integration (consultation and software development), WebCT upgrade and migration, API advice and WebCT troubleshooting." 02/11/04

WebCT's quiz tool with Calculated Questions: If you're having trouble with this, my link leads to a forum posting where Alan Cheville offers us access to a tool he's written: "I wrote a Matlab GUI which allows you to use the full Matlab function set in creating question sets to import into WebCT. It allows you to check answers before saving and even plot variables to check for singularities. 02/11/04

New digital usage dashboard for WebCT: "The folks at UBC (the original home of WebCT) have developed a set of scripts that mine the usage data and a few other variables in the WebCT database and give a system-wide picture of how the system is being used, and more importantly, allows you to anticipate the kind of usage coming down the pipe by looking at the scheduled tests and quizzes across the board." See the review in EdTechPost; or here's a direct link to information and download. 12/10/03

WebCT Discussion board extracter: Developed at UBC (Vancouver). Used to archive parts or all of threaded discussion for analysis or re-use, which provides the threads rather than the linear list which WebCT exports. Apparently it also can create RSS feeds from threads as well. 12/01/03

Teaching and Developing Online: An Edublog. "The WebCT High School E-newsletter" Hosted at U.B.C. "This blog will focus on the teaching of High School online. There are many approaches to online education and we are here to share them." 09/07/03

Javascript Generator for PopUp Windows: In the Ask Dr. C forums, Dr. Mark recommends this as an idea for creating course announcements. You can use it in your homepage's upper textblock. The great thing about this script is it only pops up ONCE per browser session, so you get the message across without annoying the reader with repeats. [Note that if you use this script, it requires a little html page for the actual announcement. And of course, that requires that you make sure the reference to that file is correct for both filename and location.] 12/05/02

WebCT Open-Source Tools and Utilities Project: has two goals. To "provide a clearinghouse for tools, utilities and documentation that make WebCT administration easier or more efficient" and to "provide a mechanism to discuss WebCT administration, seperate from the WebCT users list." 10/24/02

Browser Archives: Everyone at some time or another wishes they could get hold of an older version of some browser; this is especially true if you're using WebCT and don't have a supported browser. 06/02/02

Certification Information at WebCT

Documentation: WebCT's full documentation list

Faculty Resource Center at WebCT

Glossary Creator: Created by Alan Shapiro: "The purpose of this tool is to allow you to easily create a text file for the Glossary Tool within WebCT. The text file created will be in the correct format needed to easily import into WebCT. " 07/29/02

Merlin: "Merlin is an asynchronous web-based learning environment which provides a simple to use, but flexible framework for e-learning, collaboration and resource sharing. ... allows group co-ordinators/programme tutors direct control over their material and resources without the need for HTML or programming skills." [quote is from U.of Hull, UK] One user reports: "MERLIN generates the Web pages and course contents pages for WebCT courses. I brag that I can create a course in 3 minutes, and I CAN!! More importantly the course has structure! It has outcomes! It has objectives! It has activities! It has tests!" [Charles Coe, NAIT, Edmonton, AB, Canada] 02/20/02

SourceForge: "This is the one-stop shopping site for any and all of the publicly available, open-source tools people have created for use with WebCT."

Surveys: Creating SURVEYS with WebCT and about WebCT

• Please ask permission to use any part of these example surveys.
• Faculty Survey, from Houston U.
• Student survey from Lethbridge U.
• Discussion about using surveys within WebCT

Training/Professional Development: click from WebCT's Services page

Yale Web Style Guide: A good starting point if you haven't designed web pages before. Excellent one-stop resource, full of guidelines!

WebCT Exchange: Tools, macros, executables, icons, templates, scripts, all for download.

Educational uses of FLASH and other MULTIMEDIA resources

WEBCAST: Use your "RealPlayer" to watch this 45-minute live Webcast was originated at Utah State University. The topic was discussion of code that allows individual student tracking and auto-saving of grades or other information generated during a working session inside WebCT.

Troubleshooting/Help for your WebCT students: Created by State University of West Georgia Distance Learning

Online Teaching and Learning Newsletter: Published by WebCT but with a broad non-WebCT focus about, well, about online teaching and learning of course.

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Student Tutorials and Resources

CE6 Student tutorials: (flash demos)

VISTA 4 tutorials: [note that tutorials for Vista 4 can help you learn CE6, because the systems are the same in most aspects.] Posted by Kevin Reeve, Ask Dr.C. Both PDF and Video. Specific to a certain Bb template, but the steps are the same and should help. 01/30/08

CE6 tutorials from North West College. Scott Horton posted this link in the Ask Dr.C forums: "You are welcome to view the one's that we offer our students at my institution. Our version of WebCT is version 6.2.3 otherwise now known as Blackboard CE Enterprise License. 01/20/08

CE4.x tutorials: available in a choice of HTML, PDF, or Flash. From San Juan College, New Mexico. 05/15/06

Getting Started with WebCT: Tutorials for only CE4.1 and earlier versions.

Student Online Learning Orientation: A super site for new online students; includes a section on whether online learning is right for the student, how to have online success; tutorials, getting your computer ready, some basic skills, WebCT skills (for the CE Enterprise system), help and resources. 11/20/01

Santa Fe's Student Orientation course provides a guest login for others to use. For CE 4.1.5.

Portland Community College: Tutorials for CE 4.1

Capstone College of Nursing: Tutorials for CE 4.x -- lots of detail.

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