Sahara Locke
Sep 11 2006 12:00AM
For about the past eight years, PJC staff, faculty and students have been using a program called WebCT. But, by next year that program will make way for a new system called Angel.
The purpose of such a program, according to Dr. Bill Waters, director of distributed learning, is to provide an environment for faculty, instructors and students to work in that provides a location for online instruction.
“WebCT has been a good product for us for the last eight years or so,” Waters said. “But we decided it was time to look at the alternatives, because in the past eight years there have been so many new products emerging that maybe it’s a good time to step back and see if there was something that would suit our needs better.”
WebCT provided faculty with online grade books, a class attendance tracking mechanism, internal e-mail, and an online place where faculty can place all of their course material.
But the change was made because “in the context of the learning centered college, we wanted something that was more friendly and usable in that context,” Waters said.
“We found that Angel offered more features, like community features, collaborative learning features, things that we’re trying to work toward just to offer a better environment than WebCT.”
Angel was chosen after a six month evaluation of several products including Blackboard.
“We decided that Angel was the best one suited for us,” Waters said.
Now that Angel has been chosen, the distributed learning staff is learning how to train faculty to use it. All current distance learning courses built in WebCT will have to be converted to the Angel system during the next two semesters.
“We’re going to work as hard as we can to make this conversion as smooth as possible,” Waters said. “Once we get over the few bumps in the road and all the changes that go along with any kind of change like this, in the long term I think everybody’s going to like the product.”