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WebCT support is provided by Instructional Computing Services at the Ellbogen Center for Teaching and Learning

For common problems and their solutions, see the Online Course FAQ.

For more information contact Instructional Computing Services:

Engineering 1090

307-766-5499

ectltech@uwyo.edu 

Ellbogen Center for Teaching and Learning, University of Wyoming

Online Course Minima

Last update: 25 February, 2008; RKH

For instructors of any online course in any platform:

The WebCT, eCompanion, and WyoSakai course shells provided by UW Instructional Computing Services are meant as supplements to on-campus courses.  We support access through the UW Student Lab Systems.  Reliance on other configurations such as connections from home or a commercial ISP may lead to problems that we cannot resolve, and students should be so informed.  Please see the Online Course FAQ for more details.

Faculty should maintain their course materials on their own systems, outside their WebCT or eCompanion or WyoSakai course shells, including all syllabi, notes, images, and exams, and student records.  The student roster should be downloaded for permanent archival at the end of the class.  WebCT and WyoSakai courses are deleted at the end of each semester, and should be backed up regularly by the instructor onto his or her own file storage, both in compressed course shell form, and as separate materials. (But a future course can be based on a former one.)  Neither eCompanion nor WebCT nor WyoSakai is intended to be an archiving facility.

In eCompanion, courses are reached through the "Academics" tab and the term list.  Materials are uploaded through an edit window or the File Manager and connected to content items associated with units.  The "Author" interface makes these facilities accessible.  In WebCT, materials are uploaded through "Manage Files" and placed on a course website through addition of a page or tool.  The "Designer Options" interface makes these facilities accessible.  In WyoSakai, much of the action is in the Resources tool, which can be reached by a WebDAV interface.  If you don't understand these references, attend an online course workshop or tutorial at Instructional Computing Services before you start to rely on your course website.

Make sure your students know what to do when you refer them to the WebCT or eCompanion or WyoSakai component of the class.  They should start by reading the "Student Info" web page at http://www.uwyo.edu/ctl/Online_courses/student.htm; it contains sections of instructions for each of the platforms. Please have students try out the system early in the term by performing a low-stakes task such as reading or downloading some materials, taking a self-test, or contributing to a discussion.  (Because it's easiest to understand the procedure through a demonstration, the Coordinator of Instructional Computing will come to your class, on request, to hold one for your students.)

We recommend that you and your students avoid the new Microsoft Office 2007 document formats with file extensions ".docx," ".xlsx," ".pptx," and so forth, but rather stick to Rich Text Format (".rtf") or to the older versions of Offce for better interoperability.

For eCompanion Instructors:

  1. Students are enrolled in the eCompanion course automatically, and drops and adds are reflected in the "Course Enrollment" list within a couple of days under routine circumstances.  Because the current procedure is cumbersome and fraught with error, a course, and its students, may take several days to appear.

  2. An eCompanion course will work only with recent versions of Internet Explorer or Netscape, and Javascript must be enabled.  Browser settings must allow cookies from various eCollege sites.  Please see the Troubleshooting section of the "Instructions" document.

  3. Instructors who wish to have guest instructors or teaching assistants given privileges in their courses, or dummy students for testing purposes, must ask Instructional Computing Services for help.  For any of these requests, we need the person's name, the role that she will play, and either her extant eCollege account ID or her W-number and UW e-mail address.  Your request containing these data, along with the term and course dept/number, should be sent to "ectltech@uwyo.edu."

  4. Schedule your exam in the course before you announce it to your class, as you may find it tricky; you can only specify dates, and, optionally, a time span to apply to each date.

  5. In the Gradebook, when entering scores, "Save Changes" before you click "Share with Students."  Do not use a column in the Item Summary view to enter grades; they will not show to the students.  Use the column in the item's unit.

For WebCT Instructors:

  1. All students should use the self-registration mechanism.  Enable and disable this option yourself under the "Manage Course" selection "Manage Students" --> "Change Settings."  And your college is the category that students will need to select, as they go through the "Add Course" procedure, before they find yours listed.

  2. You can create and restore your own zip-file backups, but do not restore a backup course into a course of another name.  Backups are files created with the course ID incorporated into the file name, and restoring under a different course ID will destroy the active course.

  3. When entering a large set of grades into a column of the student roster, save it (click "update") after every 10 or 15 entries.  At some unknown load, new data may be lost on attempted update.

  4. After you make a change to a Content Module, click "Update Student View" (at the top of the designer commands). 

  5. Do not rename quizzes, once they show up as columns in the student roster.

  6. Maintenance hours for the WebCT server are midnight Saturday to 8:00 a.m. Sunday.  Schedule no online activities during that time.

For WyoSakai Instructors:

  1. Tools preserve state.  When you enter a tool, you will see the same screen, at the same level in the option hierarchy, as when you last left that tool.  To enter at the familiar top level, click the little green "refresh" arrow.

  2. In an exam, setting the feedback option to "Immediate" means that students will receive feedback right after they answer the question, which usually means during the exam.

  3. Students register themselves in your course as "Guests."  You must change their status to "Student" (Site Editor, top level).

  4. You can put shared materials in your "My Workspace" site and link to them from each course's Resources.  (In effect, this gives you a personal web and file server, private until you decide otherwise.)  When an issue arises with student access to Resources or other materials, make sure the materials are published.

  5. The DropBox is a file exchange site between instructor and individual student.  To associate grades with work, use the Assignments tool instead.

 

For more faculty help, see Instructions for Standard Teaching Tasks in eCompanion or Instructions for Standard Teaching Tasks in WebCT, or come to Instructional Computing Services at Coe 307I, or call 766-5499.