Why not let others learn from
my trial and error? For the sake of newbies like I was just a short time ago,
here are my own tips & tricks & trial-error discoveries as I taught
myself to use WebCT. Hope it helps.
|
CONTENTS -- click to pick |
| IF YOU'RE USING A Word Processor TO MAKE YOUR PAGES |
| Header/footer | Don't use in the word processor. Doesn't convert to HTML easily. |
| HTML | ...is the only WebCT-ready page format. You could use your word processor's 'Save as HTML' feature (you may need to update your version of your processor). |
| HTML from Word 2000 |
Visit here to download HTML Tidy. This little utility cleans up HTML files, with special attention for Word 2000 HTML! [Thanks to Henk Schotel.] When converting Word 2000 docs to HTML, you might encounter a problem with getting 'symbols' (when you try to print the htm file from WebCT) instead of any special characters you had in Word. The problem results from choosing a typical installation of Office 2000. WebCT designers should use the "custom" installation; select options that allow you to avoid the symbol problems when you convert a ".doc" extension to a ".htm" extension. |
| Indents, bullets, tick-boxes | ...don't transfer to HTML from Word as you'd hope. |
| k.i.s.s. | (you know the saying....keep it simple, shtoopud!) |
| Math: | If you used equation editor to create a part of your pages, notice that "save as HTML" will produce an image for each equation editor item. They are named automatically with numbers. It's best to go back into your source and put a name to each of these images as you go, so you know which is which! (Each equation editor segment is saved as a separate graphic.) |
| OR... if you aren't using Word's HTML-save feature but rather importing your Word file to an HTML editor such as Frontpage or Dreamweaver: First highlight each of your equation editor segments, cut, then paste back into Word using "paste special"/picture format. | |
| Want to post solutions to problems, and don't want to spend the time required in equation editor? Write your solutions by hand, scan, bring into Word, save as Adobe pdf file. This reduces the image to a very small file size for online use. | |
| Math HTML help | W3C's Math Home Page |
|
Superscripts; subscripts (Math, science, etc.) |
Using the HTML tags <SUP> and <SUB> Go to this page for how to do this. |
| Tables | ...won't act/look the same necessarily. See note below under "Other Tips for preparation") |
| IF YOU'RE USING POWERPOINT |
| PowerPoint Tips | Not directly related to WebCT issues, but certainly to preparing a course for distribution. This helpful page includes How to Distribute PowerPoint Presentations on CD-ROM: "Before you prepare a presentation for CD-ROM distribution, you should first understand the following limitations and procedures. Limitations: PowerPoint 2000 does not support the creation of self-running presentations; if you include multimedia with your presentation, PowerPoint does not support cross-platform or multiple-computer compatibility; if you intend to use PowerPoint Viewer 97, then you cannot include macros or ActiveX controls and components; you must embed your picture files instead of linking them." |
| PowerPoint Presentations |
In this Discussion posting, Bernie Kirkey ("Ask Dr. C") gives some clear
ideas on how to make animated PowerPoint presentations work in your WebCT
course.Contains links to PowerPoint plugin for your browser.
Mac users check out this discussion, containing links for PowerPoint plugins for your Mac browser. |
| TRY USING ADOBE ACROBAT |
| Why use Acrobat? | Use Adobe Acrobat if you want to make documents widely accessible online or offline and you're not needing to edit the documents. This is especially good if you have a document you've scanned and want to use it as-is in your course. Acrobat is a very powerful, easy to use, and relatively cheap tool (especially at academic prices) that makes placing documents from any source (scanner or some other program) in your courses very easy and effective. when Adobe is installed, it places a "save as PDF" option in your MS Word menu, making it even easier to use. You can read more about it here; there you'll find tips and resources as well. |
| USING EXCEL FOR WEBCT DATA |
| Excel web query |
Go to Using Excel to Capture WebCT Data -- Bernie Kirkey's two-part article. See
also the references in the following discussion at WebCT:
Topic: Tracking pages - use Excel web queries |
|
Excel files imported to WebCT (example: grades you've been keeping in excel and now want in WebCT's student management area) |
|
| OTHER PREPARATION TIPS (general tips for preparation) |
| Administration Tips n Resources | WebCT Open-Source Tools and Utilities |
| Backgrounds | Correct me if I'm wrong, anybody. But I THINK that if you put a background image in your HTML before uploading, and then attempt to use WebCT's global background setting or individual page background settings, your HTML and theirs will argue and the results (whether the background image appears or not) is unpredictable. Best: don't include the image in your own HTML preparations. Do it using their settings. |
| Directory structure (course) |
When creating your course, think about how you want to group segments of
the course. Make all directories the same on your drive as you'll want in
WebCT. Then file/image refs will match exactly when all is uploaded. On
your own computer, keep directories distinct and labelled by segment. Images
directory separate also. WARNING! If you decide later to move files around in your course, you will have to re-assign each of your course-path items to the new file locations!!! Better to decide on file structure at the beginning and then leave it that way. |
| File Names | Remember, WebCT is a browser based platform. Think about what characters can be used to create web addresses. For example, you cannot use a SPACE in a web address. WebCT file names, therefore, cannot use spaces either, or any other characters not useable in browser URLs. If you want something resembling a space in your file name, use an underscore like_this. |
| Frames | Don't use 'em! WebCT has frames already. |
| Glossary, Indexing | WebCT's features like glossary and indexing are great additional refinement features you can do for your students. As you work, think about how you might be able to use these features. (See below for tips on preparing your Glossary entries.) |
| Images | If your images don't show up after you import the files, check that the extensions of the images did not get changed to either upper or lower case (the img tag needs to exactly match the filename, case sensitive). Ensure that the image tags lead to the correct location for your images folder in your WebCT file structure. |
| Importing HTML |
Go to this short article
for some excellent tips: |
| Linking to internal course files |
Occasionally you'll want
to use a URL to a file you've uploaded to your WebCT file area. What's
the URL to use? Try this syntax for Absolute Reference: http://servername:portnumber/courseid/filename |
| Linking to external URLs | Use
the usual HTML for URLs. |
| Links in Bulletin Board | If a student wants to put a link in a Bulletin Board posting, they just have to copy/paste the URL. It will appear as a link even without using the HTML format for a URL. (Most HTML will NOT work in the BB postings, however.) |
| Linking around | You don't need to imbed links for course navigation into your pages. Buttons for "back" and "next" and "home" are supplied by WebCT, albeit with a slightly different use/result than we're used to in a browser. |
| Multimedia Software |
A discussion on WebCT's Hub about which software to use to produce WebCT-friendly graphics, audio, video, animation, etc. Good tips! |
| Page length | If possible, break pages into very short segments of text. |
| Page size | Remember you're designing for only a part-page that will appear in a frame on the right side of a WebCT window and under the WebCT button bar. |
| Quiz Tips |
How to produce a
warning message for your students that the quiz time will expire in
x minutes: |
| Tables | Results will vary. For table/cell widths use percentages rather than sizes so they'll fit the coursepage frame in WebCT. |
| Table-of-Contents (for Coursepages) | If you want to use this WebCT feature, a TOC will be on the left of your course files in a separate frame, so no need to make one on your pages. |
| TOOLS "of the trade" |
| Hot Potatoes | "The Hot Potatoes suite includes six applications, enabling you to create interactive multiple-choice, short-answer, jumbled-sentence, crossword, matching/ordering and gap-fill exercises for the World Wide Web." I hear it's very WebCT compatible. Hacking in Hot Potatoes: Are you a Hot Potatoes user? Check this out! "We have built the architecture of Hot Potatoes in such a way that anyone with a little knowledge about the underlying code can easily make significant customizations without risk. In this presentation, we'll show three examples, each showing how a little coding knowledge in one of HTML, CSS, or JavaScript can give you a lot of power over how Hot Potatoes exercises appear and behave." 01/10/04 |
| Respondus |
"A free software application for WebCT users. Create WebCT quizzes and question
banks offline. Supports six types of questions, plus feedback. Quizzes are
seamlessly transferred to WebCT (versions 2.1 and higher) See a discussion on the use of this software here. A user's review of the software is here. |
| Source Forge | "...one-stop shopping site for any and all of the publicly available, open-source tools people have created for use with WebCT." |
| WebCT Exchange | "...your source for WebCT documentation, tools, tricks and anything else that's cool. See what others are doing with WebCT and share what you've created with the world!" |
| WebCT Make Quiz | This Macro application will create (convert) a WebCT multiple-choice quiz file from a pre-existing text file. Mac or PC. |
| GoBCL | FREE Online Document Publishing in PDF or HTML: "goBCL can publish your document into PDF or HTML file format for free. All of the processes will take place in our server." Hey, it's FAST too! |
| WITHIN WEBCT -- Tips from things I've been learning the hard way |
| 3 Stage Approach |
(Thanks to Rob MacAulay, SD83!) Stage 1: Just get the course online, the framework, the essentials. You can work from an existing course, even if it's only paper-based right now. Just convert the files to HTML and load to WebCT. |
| Stage 2: Enhancements. Add links, extras, files for student download, quiz questions, tests, glossaries, indexes, etc. This stage completes the supply of learning materials for the student beyond the basics. | |
| Stage 3: Add pizzaz, interactivity. Interactive quizzes, tests,Java, Flash, video clips, you name it. This is the make-it-fun stage when the course is transformed to real online education format. | |
| Stage 4: User Feedback: (I know Rob only told of 3 phases, but I'd add this one based on comments from other experts.) Build into your course a feedback section (for example, at the end of each unit). Keep improving your course regularly based on feedback from learners. They know what works and what doesn't. | |
| Welcome Page Links | Files stored in your File Manager can't be accessed from outside or linked to other sites. Unfortunately, this means you cannot link from the Welcome Page to any files located in your WebCT File Manager, since the User will not be authorized to access files from your File Manager before logging in. One workaround to this is to link the file to another server (Ex: Using a free hosting service) and link that file to your Welcome Page. |
| How much to put online? | Get a good text and refer to it, don't rewrite one. |
| Publishers are WebCT friendly | Many publishers already have their texts online in WebCT format. Example: Pearson's "adopt and adapt" texts. Cost is reasonable, and complete courses are prewritten based on the text. Most at post-secondary level, but see SD83's TPC12, which uses Pearson Publishing's adopt and adapt course materials. (The "View Courses" section below tells how to view this course at SD83.) |
| Student view | ...in WebCT designer windows isn't entirely wysiwyg. [For example, the bg doesn't show in all student views, so I didn't see a that a white table bg was covering my bg edge design.] |
| Concurrent Student View | While working in your "designer view", to see a TRUE "student view" use a whole different browser. (ie, if using IE, check it out in Netscape, and vice versa). Another window in the same browser won't do it. |
| Upload and download | ...of one file at a time is tedious and slow in WebCT. Instead, load them into a zip file, upload to the target directory, and unzip. Much faster, even for a handful of files. |
| Bulletin Board postings | Spell-check your Instructor BB postings before posting. You don't want to post errors (I did) and they can't be fixed later, other than by deleting the whole message, which isn't good after a thread has begun underneath! (P.S. There's no spell checker --that I've found yet-- onboard WebCT. Correct me if I'm wrong?) |
| Glossary Preparation | I found the description a little confusing for how to make a glossary file for uploading to WebCT's Glossary function. My suggestion: manually create about 3 entries using WebCT's Glossary "add" tool. Then use the "download" tool on this short Glossary. Open the file in your word processor. The format used is clearer this way than in their instructions for creating a file to upload as Glossary. Also: as far as I can tell, "linking keywords" in your glossary can only be done one entry at a time. So after uploading your Glossary file, you have to go through the whole glossary if you want to link keywords. |
| Printing Assignments | ...from WebCT: students should use the "compiler" feature. Check out the student tutorial on this. |
| Synchronous Classes | Use the Calendar feature for posting assignments and the day's or week's activities. |