WebCT Courseware Adventures in Introductory Financial Accounting

This article is based on a presentation I made at the University of Manitoba Teaching Services Teaching & Learning Symposium, September, 2002. I am grateful to the session participants, and to my colleagues who teach 9.110 (Introductory Financial Accounting), for their helpful comments.

WebCT (www.webct.com) is one of several software packages (Blackboard is a popular alternative) designed to facilitate the creation of a course website. It promises to make internet-based tools like bulletin boards, chat rooms, online quizzes, and other online learning activities available to instructors with only basic computer skills. The University of Manitoba became a WebCT university in 1996 and we adopted it in our introductory financial accounting class (9.110) in September, 2000. In this article, I describe how we used WebCT, and the successes and failures we had with it.

First, a few words on the 9.110 context. Ours is the first class in Accounting. It is required of all Management students, as well as students in faculties like Engineering and Agriculture who are pursuing a Management pattern. In the fall, we typically have 650-700 students, most in their first and second years, registered in nine coordinated sections. The different sections are taught by as many as five different instructors, most of them sessional lecturers. The combined voluntary withdrawal and failure rate is usually in the 25%-30% range, reflecting a wide variation of student interest in, and commitment to, the course. Students do two examinations, a series of six to eight individual assignments, and one large term project in four-person teams. Our faculty undergraduate computer lab has sixty computers.

We use WebCT to post complete lecture notes and handouts after each class. The textbook publisher gave us permission to post solutions to suggested textbook exercises, as well as chapter summaries and quizzes designed to work specifically in a WebCT environment. We established a public bulletin board to post general information for students, as well as private bulletin boards for each group. Finally, each student was able to see privately within WebCT his/her own grades, as well as descriptive statistics for all student grades.

Several things worked well in WebCT. I was comfortable with all of its features after two three-hour training sessions. The interface is generally accessible and intuitively clear to both students and instructors. At least 80% of our students had off-campus internet access (as of Winter 2002), which eased considerably the congestion in our faculty computer lab. Generally, the students reacted favourably to WebCT, with the website hit rate reaching an average of two visits per student per week in the 2002 winter semester. Because the site was password-protected, the publishers allowed us to post virtually any of the instructor supplements that we wished. Student surveys indicate that students were particularly pleased with the availability of textbook solutions and grade results on the website.

There were also problems. We found that in-class demonstrations were essential to get most students to visit the site, and not all of our classroom layouts are conducive to this kind of demonstration. Our part-time instructors, in particular, had only limited access to hardware and software training and were, therefore, unable to contribute to the website in a meaningful way or help students with WebCT problems. That made for a heavy time commitment for me as the coordinator, a commitment made more difficult by the clunky instructor interface (e.g., uploading one file to the website required 10-15 mouse clicks and as much as 40 seconds).  

The bulletin boards were generally a positive feature. They allowed us enhanced, standardized, and timely communications with students in all sections. The private group bulletin boards were unexpectedly successful for two reasons. The first, and most obvious, reason was that students were able to post term project work where only other group members could find it. The second reason related to the student motivation problems described above. The instructors formed the student groups randomly, and many groups had difficulties identifying and contacting one or more group members. In many cases, the missing student had dropped the course or was uninterested in the term project, and neither the students nor the instructors knew about it. The private bulletin board was a convenient way for groups to prove that they had made a bona fide effort to contact a missing group member before going ahead on the project without the absent member.

Bulletin board problems were largely related to student misuse and, once again, awkward design. Many of the students had problems writing clear bulletins. A frequent problem was the subject line, which often had an uninformative title like “question” or “problem”. On occasion, students accidentally posted items on the main bulletin board that were clearly meant for a private group (with sometimes humorous results). A number of students used the main bulletin board to discuss (and, most often, complain about) specific course issues or personal problems, items that would have been handled more appropriately by a private email or visit to the instructor. Finally, setting up the private group bulletin boards was particularly cumbersome and tedious. Each one required at least 20 keystrokes and mouse clicks. To set up the required 175 group bulletin boards took over six hours.

The online grades feature in WebCT was an unqualified success. Each student received detailed, confidential feedback. It allowed verification that the student’s score was correctly recorded and showed that score’s standing in the overall student distribution. The uploading and processing of student grades was relatively straightforward.

Some of the interesting features of WebCT did not work for us at all. The quiz and testing facility seemed powerful and relatively easy to use, but was not practical for us given the limited computer facilities at our disposal. I set up a chat room and electronic whiteboard and advertised aggressively my “virtual office hours”, but had no interest at all from the students. Many participants at the conference reported the same reaction from their students, suggesting that students are not interested in virtual office hours if the instructor is available in person.

Overall, I have been pleased with the performance of WebCT and am hopeful that it will continue to improve in the future. Textbook publishers are providing more and better WebCT resources to accompany their textbooks. New versions of WebCT and other software utilities are now available that reduce or eliminate many of the irritations that we experienced. Finally, our classrooms are undergoing some long overdue renovations that promise to make WebCT demonstrations and other internet-based teaching activities much easier.

For instructors considering whether to adopt WebCT or some similar technology, I strongly recommend WebCT as a relatively easy piece of software to learn and use. It offers many capabilities, but it is not necessary to adopt all or even most of them. The features most favoured by my students (bulletin board, online textbook solutions, and online grades) can be implemented with relatively little instructor investment and can pay substantial dividends in convenience and student satisfaction.  

Cameron Morrill
University of Manitoba
cameron_morrill@umanioba.ca