Virtually Victorian

Students taking a course called “The Woman Question in Victorian Literature and Culture,” taught by English professor Susan Bernstein, have found a “space” outside the classroom, a space that’s engaging and informative, a space that makes the classroom a better place to be.

Details WebCT (World Wide Web Course Tools) is a product that facilitates the creation of web-based educational environments accessible with a web browser. For details, check out the WebCT site. See also Teaching and learning technology symposium scheduled

You could think of it as the electronic equivalent of a cozy study lined with ruddy wood and leather-bound books in a fine old home of, oh, Victorian vintage.

This Victorian study is virtual, but it borders on being real for two reasons. For one thing, it’s interactive, so you can feel the electricity of mind meeting mind. And everything’s integrated in this elegant room.

The study was basically built with one tool: WebCT (World Wide Web Course Tools), a software framework for the delivery of web-based course materials. The program was developed at the University of British Columbia expressly for academic use, and now about 600 institutions use it.

After a campus pilot test this school year, the Division of Information Technology (DoIT) has decided to support WebCT for faculty use. Support will include a 24-hour help desk and training to begin in May. And for the first year, the UW System is underwriting the cost to users.

WebCT is reasonably easy to use, but local technical support can help, and Bernstein had that in spades: her doctoral advisee Erin Smith. Smith has integrated technology into the English Department’s composition courses as well as Bernstein’s class. In other words, advisee turned adviser for this WebCT project, to Bernstein’s pedagogical benefit.

“There’s a lot of fear that technology will make classroom teaching obsolete,” says Bernstein, “but on the contrary, it’s invigorated my teaching and the quality of classroom discussion.” And it’s a far cry from the Web site she used for a course two years ago, which she calls “a glorified syllabus.”

Smith likes the integration of WebCT. “Everything you need to create the site is contained within WebCT,” she says, “and everything students need is there, too. We don’t have to teach them five or six different ways to access the information.”

If we enter their Victorian room – which got largely favorable reviews from Bernstein’s students in a recent evaluation – we’ll see many features of WebCT:

• The site is password-protected, so only students and instructors can enter.
• Students can e-mail each other about the course and collaborate on papers or other projects in a presentation area.
• Participants can conduct “threaded” discussions on the bulletin board that shows organized and related comments of teacher and students, which can be printed out.
• Pairs of students talk in the chat room (called Drawing Room in this case) from the point of view of certain characters in the assigned novels. However, the chat room function of WebCT has not proven entirely stable, especially for the Macintosh platform.
• A course calendar can be viewed on which the students can make private notes.
• Students take self-assessment quizzes on their readings that are instantly graded, and they also can privately check on their grades to date.
• Bernstein and Smith capitalized on WebCT’s image database option by creating a Victorian gallery of paintings and book illustrations from various editions.

WebCT has other functions – references, glossary, student home pages, audio and video, for example – and you can choose what you use for any given course. Indeed, you should pick and choose, says Smith: “WebCT has many options, but you should be careful of using more than you – and the students – can handle at one time.

“In this new information environment,” she says, “it makes sense to investigate technology, instead of viewing it as an enemy.”