It’s been an interesting and sometimes challenge process, creating a demo course in WebCT Vista.

What I did
I started by creating the general discussion forum topics, which was beyond simple – even in terms of scheduling selective release. Then I created group discussion forums, and moved on to create a custom splash page for the entire course. I would have appreciated more flexibility an options for creating the splash page (beyond building it all in HTML, of course). Finally, I created dummy content modules – including one programmed for selective release. The only challenge here was discovering that Vista prefers that text pages for course modules be uploaded in HTML form. But overall, this was a relatively simple assignment.

Reflection on experience
I started with no previous knowledge of the internals of Vista – precisely the reason I chose to use it over Moodle. My preconceptions coming into the experience were fairly negative … Vista is built in an older language (Perl) and on outdated frameworks, and the user side has a very traditional web 1.0 look and feel. So I didn’t expect much.

Part of those low expectations were fulfilled when I learned that Vista privileges uploading an HTML file to create a course text component rather than editing in a web page. In many senses Vista is less sophisticated in course site creation than WordPress … the free open-source blogging application that powers this e-folio.

But Vista does have a significant number of educational tools, and as I used those to create modules, forums, and assignments, and schedule the release of components, and prepare a custom splash page for the course … I came to appreciate what it does offer. And that is, primarily, a fairly simple but full-featured way to create and run courses online, with many components and content and interaction types at the course-builder’s disposal.

SECTIONS
The SECTIONS model provided by Bates and Poole (2003) is a way to assess educational technology.

• Students
  As I outlined in my LMS proposal, my proposed audience is teachers. Teachers have access to the technology that would allow them to connect; my challenge would be finding a Vista server to run the course on.

• Ease of use and reliability
  Vista is not fancy – it’s not web2.0. But is is fairly easy to use, and fairly reliable. To be honest, I think Moodle running on Linux would have an edge in reliability.

• Cost
  This is the central problem, for me, with Vista. Competing with free is hard, and Vista is not even cheap. The expense of Vista makes it difficult to me to choose this for an actual project.

• Teaching and learning
  Vista include many components for interactivity and real-time collaboration … but the realities of the web and of remote learners seem to privilege asynchronous technologies like text and forums.

• Interactivity
  As just mentioned, interactivity seems to be more technically possible with Vista than socially.

• Organizational issues
  Since cost would be a factor, to build my course(s) using Vista, I’d need to get organization buy-in, which adds layers, complexity, delays, and cost to the project.

• Novelty
  This technology is not new, and not very novel.

• Speed
  Courses can be created fairly quickly and changed fairly quickly with this technology. However, once needs to be aware that if you put rich media into the course … many videos and audio files are not quick and easy to change and update.

Next steps
For me, the next steps are to go back to Moodle, to develop simple courses that are open for everyone. However, the next step is also to step away from the course-builder and course-taker dichotomy, and adopt a more commons-oriented, wiki-inspired we are all teachers and we are all learners philosophy … and to open up the course-building to a much larger number of people.

Simple technologies that are open win.