WebCT, developed at the University of British Columbia, is among several client-server software packages designed for creating Web-based courseware. It offers an extensive set of educational and administrative tools, including a conferencing system, on-line chat, student progress tracking, group project organization, student self-evaluation, grade maintenance and distribution, access control, navigation tools, auto-marked quizzes, electronic mail, automatic index generation, course calendar, student homepages, and course content searches. It is promoted as requiring limited technical experience and expertise on the part of course developers and demands only a Java-enabled Web browser on the part of students. The creators suggest that WebCT "can be used to create entire on-line courses, or to simply publish materials the supplement existing courses."

Although the School of Nursing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison uses several synchronous distance technologies for its on-campus students and for degree-completion courses offered through the Collaborative Nursing Program of the University of Wisconsin System, the Web is playing a growing role as an instructional technology in these courses, because a significant number of nursing students juggle work, families, and education. Asynchronous technologies like the Web are increasingly attractive, because they give more flexibility to students.

Faculty and instructional support staff working in collaboration and using commercial WYSIWYG software in the School of Nursing have developed parts or all of ten courses on the Web over the past two years. Motivated clerical staff have been trained and equipped as part of an informal Web "team" to provide additional support. Over the past year, the School has also participated in a campus pilot project to evaluate WebCT. One pilot course, now in its second semester of use, has been completed, and two additional courses are being developed.

Compared with our earlier Web experiences, using WebCT to develop basic content pages for our initial pilot course proved to be more time-consuming. Designed for developers with little or no HTML experience, the interface is more cumbersome than our customary development tools. For Web team members assuming responsibility for multiple courses and facing short turnaround times this would be a problem. On the other hand, what the School has not offered on its own Web servers has been database tools that allow for student tracking, online exams, and threaded discussions. These tools are in great demand by faculty, and the tools offered by WebCT have been a great attraction. In practice, these tools have proven to be more feature-rich than we anticipated, relatively easy to use, and effective.

For these reasons, early in our experience with the initial pilot course we adopted the model of developing the core content pages in-house and using the WebCT tools as a supplement to extend course activities. The course is focused around government and academic health care resources, everything from complete sets of dermatology slides to disease statistics - available via the Internet and around a core set of readings. To promote discussion, the course uses the WebCT conferencing tool in particular to share written exercises and to provide a forum for response. Each of the course content areas has its own conference area. The courses now being developed also use the quizzing tool. It has been very easy for developers to link from the course pages hosted on our own server to the specialized pages developed with WebCT and supported on the campus WebCT server.

There have been a couple of downsides to this model. Students are required to log on initially to the content pages on our server and to use a second logon to access the WebCT server. For those who are new to Web courses this has occasionally been confusing. The general look and navigation for the two systems is also different, and that has also been confusing for students early in the course. By the end of the first six weeks, however, all students seem to have accommodated to the differences and to have no trouble negotiating their way between the two systems.

There is a great appeal in having the technologically more complex components of the course hosted and maintained centrally by the campus, because it allows us to focus our limited resources on content design and development rather than on technological support. However, what will ultimately determine whether we will continue with our current model of using WebCT to add activities to course materials developed separately will be feedback from our students. If they express satisfaction with the current design and do not require extensive support in navigating to and utilizing the tools, we expect not only to continue our reliance on the WebCT tools, but to expand our use of them to include group projects, chat rooms, and student-generated pages.