WebCT: A major shift of emphasis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The evaluation reports in this series usually feature several products at once.The current review, however, comes at a time when one of the most widely used (and expensive) online learning management systems is undergoing a major change in its marketing strategy and corporate focus.WebCT is currently evolving to a new version (WebCT Vista), with much attendant discussion by distance education (DE) users.The current review, as the others in this series, adds the DE student's perspective to this discussion.The review compares the existing WebCT Campus Edition with the new WebCT Vista, and examines some of the problems associated with the migration to Vista at the institutional level.A response to the report by the WebCT company is appended. The WebCT ProductWebCT, or World Wide Web Course Tools, is was originally a Canadian product originally developed at the University of British Columbia in 1995, as part of a research project to study the impact of online learning on student outcomes, out of a desire to enhance and enrich the learning experience through new technologies.Today, it is used by 10 million students at over 2,500 universities and colleges in 80 countries, and is described as having "revolutionized the way people teach and learn" (UBC, 2004).In 1999, the WebCT interest merged with Universal Learning Technologies of Massachusetts, and has offices in Canada, the US, and Australia.In the process, the product's mission has expanded from serving purely educational purposes to providing "enterprise-wide" learning management solutions in all areas of e-learning and training.Today, the WebCT Campus Edition (CE) is claimed by its vendor to be a "global market-leading Course Management System (CMS)" ( WebCT website, 2004).The WebCT Vista Academic Enterprise edition is the latest version.One WebCT user, the New Mexico State University, indicates (2003), that the company: ". . . is scheduled to discontinue support of its Campus Edition version in December 2006 leaving only the Vista edition of the course management system available and supported."(At that point, NMSU estimates that its annual licensing and running charges will rise from $40,000 to, in the first year of Vista operation, $650,800 US.)The estimated first year cost for a perpetual Vista license at New Mexico State University is $290,400.Additional costs would
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.029 | 0.032 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.029 | 0.015 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".