Faculty Support Centre News

Changes to WebCT Online Course Management Tool

Course Creation in WebCT
Due to the exponential growth in the use of WebCT by faculty and students, changes have been made in the way that new WebCT courses are created. The Faculty Support Centre will no longer be creating "development" courses. Courses will now be "live" (visible to registered students) immediately upon creation, and will be populated with registered students when they are created. This means that all courses will now be available at the beginning of a term and registered students will be able to see their courses as soon as each course is created.

New courses are created with content and tools "hidden", or not visible to anyone but the course creator and/or administrator. A message will appear on the front page of the course advising students that they are in the right place. Instructors are encouraged to personalize this message to be more reflective of the individual course, and to let students know when they may expect the course content to appear. Courses based on previous courses will require the instructor to hide content as appropriate. Instructions for hiding/revealing your course content may be found at http://www.yorku.ca/fsc/webct/faculty/faqs.htm#revealtools.

Upgrades/Patches
WebCT has released a number of service packages and hotfixes to address a number of issues reported with various tools. For more information on the issues which have been addressed by the upgrades/patches, see http://www.fsc.yorku.ca/webct/serveroutages.htm.

New Language Templates
In addition to the York standard English language course template which is currently available, French and Spanish language course templates are now available. When making your new course request using the form at http://www.yorku.ca/fsc/webct/faculty/request.htm, you may now select the language of your choice!

New FSC Services

The Faculty Support Centre offers two new services this year.

Document Conversion
FSC can facilitate conversion of WordPerfect documents (such as manuscripts) to MS Word. The conversion service has a high rate of accuracy. If you have documents which you need to convert from WordPerfect to Word, contact the Faculty Support Centre at ext. 55800 or by email at faculty@yorku.ca.

Website Structure for Faculty Members
In past years the Faculty Support Centre has offered website course template creation for faculty members. This year FSC offers a complete website structure for individual members of faculty - a shell which you can fill with content and link to your course website. For a look at an application using the website structure, see the website of Professor W. Struthers, an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology, Faculty of Arts at http://www.yorku.ca/struther/.

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