Blackboard Vista replacing WebCT
Changes have been made and software tested for the new WebCT program Blackboard Vista, which should be ready for students and professors by the fall semester, said Instructional Technology Team Coordinator Kevin Reeve.
WebCT and Blackboard Vista used to be competitors until Blackboard Inc. purchased WebCT last year, Reeve said.
Since the sale, the university has been allowed to use the old version for a while, while other schools have already upgraded.
“The current system is kind of a batch process and there are some problems with it. It just doesn’t work like it should all of the time, and it requires human intervention,” Reeve said. “It’s old technology and WebCT, now Blackboard, decided to build a new version of it, and that’s Blackboard Vista.”
Blackboard Vista is a statewide initiative. Schools in the state, together with the Utah Education Network and the Board of Regents Office, Utah System of Higher Education went to the Utah Legislature a couple of years ago to get funding for the project.
“Over the last two years, we’ve got funding from the legislature to do it,” Reeve said.
Reeve has been using Blackboard Vista for two years, and this spring semester, professors of 16 courses with about 1,500 students enrolled, have been using the pilot program.
This summer, administrators plan on having 120 fully online courses and about five face-to-face courses.
They will also be working on an Access or Banner, the current student online registration, and the Academic Resource Center to integrate with Blackboard Vista. The usernames and passwords will be the same for Banner and Blackboard.
The new system will all be automatic, and every class in Banner’s catalog will automatically have a place in Blackboard Vista. Then faculty can choose on their own whether they want to use it or not, Reeve said.
In the past, WebCT has been run off of one server.
“But when it goes down, it goes down. And everybody’s offline,” he said. “I can probably count on one hand the number of times we’ve had any problems with the server, with campus edition starting in 1997,” he said.
With Blackboard, there will be five servers housed in a central location, the UEN, to serve all of the schools in the state.
Updating to Blackboard Vista may be a good change, but doesn’t come without problems.
“I kind of felt like the old one is more user-friendly,” said Mary Anne Jones, a senior in elementary education. “I understood how to use it. It didn’t really take me that long to figure out. (Backboard)’s just hard because every icon has a couple different ways to get to the same thing.”
She said the Blackboard main menu has big icons that go to different places than a student is looking for. USU’s instructional design team is trying to help fix problems.
“We’ve really spent the last few months working as an instructional design team to try to come up with a design standard that really makes it easy for students to find stuff and easy for faculty to update their courses from semester to semester,” Reeve said.
The new version may be hard to adjust to, but some of that is from downloads required for the program such as Adobe Acrobat Reeder, Java technology and Flash technology.
“As all new software comes out, it also requires different settings, and Blackboard takes advantage of Java technology. It requires that students have updated browsers, and popup blockers turned off, and certain settings like that so that it can operate and do the things that it does,” Reeve said.
Flash technology on some WebCT pages can be a problem for students if their computers are not updated.
“Some people were really frustrated because their computers were older and they couldn’t get the Flash to open,” Jones said about students in her class.
“I think it would be better if you didn’t need all of those extra downloads,” she added.
One problem for her class was trying to find posts on the discussion page. The issue was the page only showed 10 discussions per page.
“At this point I would never do another class with this,” said Carol Reese, a student in the Library Media Administration Endorsement Program.
Reese said she thinks she had trouble using the new WebCT at home because her computer is about 20 years old. She said she would log on to the site and then go to click on her class, and nothing would show on the screen.
To fix problems, students should go to the “check browser” link that is built into the Blackboard Vista Web page to make sure their settings can handle the new technology, Reeve said.
“It can be frustrating when it’s just one student out of a thousand,” Reeve said.
To make the change to Blackboard Vista, the Information Technology Service Desk can help with the program and username and password problems.
“I figured it out, but I use computers a lot and so I’m more familiar with things like that. But I know that there were people in our class that could have used more training on it,” Jones said.
-ranaebang@cc.usu.edu