Computer News No. 123 Sep.-Oct. 2006
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Computer News No. 123 Sep.-Oct. 2006 |
Highlights After Upgrading to WebCT CE6
1. Introduction
As reported in issue 122 of Computer News, a new WebCT CE6 server for e-learning was launched in August, 2006. Over the past couple of months, most activities using the WebCT e-learning system were conducted through this new server.
400 courses in CE6 are being used by over 7,500 students in this first term. In September, over 120,000 logins from teachers and students were recorded on CE6. On the other hand, about 130 courses are still making use of the old CE4.1 server, serving 6,500 students. However, the number of logins to CE4.1 in September has dropped to 40,270 versus 115,151 same time last year. The data shows that over 75% of the activities on WebCT are now running on the CE6 platform.
Although the user interface of CE6 has been substantially redesigned by WebCT, it is encouraging to see that our teachers and students adopt to the new CE6 environment in a very short time.
A teacher can start to develop new course on CE6 by simply filling in a form. We organize regular training on creating WebCT courses and the next one will be on December 19, 2006. (To register, please visit HKU Portal => "Services" tab => "Workshops and Courses" link.)
Since the CE4.1 license will expire in August 2007, teachers who are still using CE4.1 should plan for the migration to CE6 as soon as possible. The following highlights how a teacher can migrate the course still running on CE4.1 to CE6.
2. My course is still running on CE4.1 this term, how can I move to CE6 later?
As a teacher, if your course has been successfully migrated from CE4.1 to CE6 in the August migration exercise and you have made update to the course content on CE4.1 instead of on CE6, you can redo the migration procedure and it should be successful provided that you haven't used tailor-made programs that are incompatible with CE6.
If your course was not successfully migrated in the August migration exercise (i.e. you cannot find your course in CE6), you would need to remove any special program or HTML codes that are incompatible with CE6 before retrying the migration procedure. Please contact the undersigned for details if necessary.
3. Some common questions on CE6 from teachers and students
While most users adopt to CE6 without much problem, we received a few commonly asked questions in the past 2 months, e.g.:
- problem in seeing the "MyComputer" icon for uploading files,
- problem in downloading Word or Excel files,
- will both CE6 and CE4.1 be updated when I update my course contents? (The answer is 'No' because CE6 and CE4.1 are running on different servers.)
To help users find solutions to their problems faster, we have prepared an FAQ page on WebCT for our users' reference.
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