The Future of WebCT

From Lrg-wiki

WebCT and WebCT.Inc

The Future of WebCT.Com: Blackboard.Com

In early 2005, WebCT.Com was acquired by their major competitor, Blackboard.Com and is in the process of being "merged." At that time, WebCT had two online course products - the WebCT Campus Edition (CE 4.1, used at UVM), and the WebCT Vista Enterprise Edition (often used by large state university systems to support courses on several campuses). In addition, WebCT was developing a replacement for CE, called CE 6.0, that would be more Vista-like: Vista used a separate database, CE did not use a database architecture. Blackboard had a similar product selection.

Originally, WebCT had planned to have the CE 6.0 product in production for 2006, and at UVM we had thought we would be able to follow that schedule. When that didn't look possible, we thought that perhaps 2007 would be feasible. CE 6.0 has not yet a point where we (Academic Computing and Center for Teaching and Learning) feel that it could be used to replace WebCT CE 4.1, and at the best, it would be possible in 2008. CE 6 Issues

Blackboard.Com has additional plans for the product line. For WebCT CE 6.0, the first change is branding; the new product will become known as Blackboard Campus Edition 6.1 (sometimes called Application Pack 1.0). Initially, this will be a completely separate product from the Blackboard Learning System. Future systems are envisioned to "merge code bases" and provide a new system representing the best of both systems.

In short, WebCT as we know it has a limited and somewhat unknown future.

Next Generation Course Management Systems

The evolution of WebCT and Blackboard represent a particular trend in course management systems - sort of a "computer based traiing meets the world wide web" circa 1996.

Since then, the web has changed, a la webct 2.0; google, wikipedia, instant messenger, blogging, facebook, ...