University of Alberta: eLearning: From Grass Roots to Mission-Critical
eLearning
began at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada with a few brave
faculty members who decided to try something new. They started small: making
their course syllabi, lecture notes, or class assignments available to students
via the Web. Students responded positively—even seeking out particular instructors
or courses that featured online components.
Today, what began as a grassroots movement by students and faculty has evolved
into an institution-wide eLearning program that is closely aligned with the
university's core mission and goals. The university currently offers approximately
1,500 online courses, with more than 120,000 student registrations—and expects
a continued 25 percent growth for the next several years.
Building Momentum
"Early days" of eLearning at the university consisted of individual
instructors or departments using various teaching and learning tools to incorporate
Web-based material into their courses. As more and more faculty ventured into
the world of online learning, student demand for such courses continued to grow,
prompting faculty to consolidate their efforts and work toward a centralized
solution.
The first step involved forming a committee to evaluate and select a centrally
supported course management system for the school. The committee consisted of
representatives from across the university, including faculty members, support
professionals, and IT staff.
The university looked at eLearning as a competitive advantage and powerful
means of working toward strategic institutional goals, such as improving the
learning environment, recruiting and retaining top-notch faculty, and attracting
high-achieving students. After evaluating several eLearning applications, WebCT's
course management system was selected.
Smart Growth
The school began development and testing of the pilot course management system
in the spring of 1998. In September, the system went live with 100 courses and
8,000 users. By the end of the 1998-1999 academic year, those figures rapidly
grew to 375 courses and more than 14,000 users. Course offerings spanned the
university's departments and included undergraduate, graduate, certificate,
and extension programs.
Susan Stein, Distributed Learning Project Lead and WebCT Administrator for
the university's Computing and Network Services (CNS), group is responsible
for driving the adoption of the WebCT solution on campus. She has worked to
align the department's efforts with mandates and objectives outlined in the
key strategic initiatives.
"Our role in CNS is to provide end-to-end support for the university's eLearning
initiatives, encompassing everything from server and software management to
course planning, design, development, and delivery, as well as faculty and student
training. We collaborate with a number of support groups on campus to meet the
full range of instructors' and students' requirements in support of eLearning,"
explains Stein.
"Continuous improvement of the teaching and learning environment is critical
to the university's long-term goals, and our partnerships with both WebCT and
Sun Microsystems have enabled us to implement an eLearning solution that is
scalable, reliable, and cost-effective in support of those goals."
Secrets to Success
The University of Alberta identified several key factors that were instrumental
in ensuring the success of its eLearning initiatives. First, it's important
to build support at all levels of the organization—from students and faculty,
to academic computing groups, senior administrators, and the university's president.
The university's CNS group was instrumental in bringing senior administrators
on board with eLearning by demonstrating the mission-critical nature of the
application.
Second, it's critical to provide the technology backbone and centrally managed
user support services necessary to facilitate the broad adoption of eLearning
across campus. As more and more faculty and students began to rely on eLearning,
the school realized the paramount importance of providing a reliable, secure,
high-performance eLearning environment to ensure user satisfaction. The university
has worked closely with WebCT and Sun Microsystems Inc. to build a scalable,
high-availability eLearning infrastructure capable of supporting the rapidly
growing number of online courses and student seats.
Third, the university realized the importance of fostering faculty ownership
of the eLearning program. In moving to a centralized eLearning environment,
the university was never looking for a "mandated" solution—it chose a course
management system that would be easy to use for novice faculty, as well as provide
sophisticated teaching and learning capabilities for faculty to build more advanced
courses over time.
The CNS group provides training to assist faculty with online course design
and development and collaborates with faculty to develop best practices for
eLearning and ways to incorporate Web-based material into their existing courses.
While eLearning began with just a few innovative faculty members, that vision
has scaled to more than 1,000 instructors who are leveraging eLearning at the
university today.
Looking to the Future
The University of Alberta expects a continued 25 percent growth in the number
of online courses and user registrations for the next several years. For the
2002-2003 academic year, the school anticipates more than 1,800 courses and
approximately 150,000 student registrations.
The phenomenal growth of eLearning across the University of Alberta campus
is evidence of the critical role that online learning stands to play in the
evolution of the institution. Not as a standalone technology, but as an integral
part of its academic strategy and processes.
In early 2002, the University of Alberta became the first institution to select
WebCT Vista, an Academic Enterprise System (AES) that g'es beyond the capabilities
of a course management system to support enterprise-scale eLearning deployments.
The institution will benefit from an enterprisewide framework that allows it
to fully leverage its content and learning assets, as well as significantly
advanced capabilities for scalability and extensibility of the eLearning environment.
The University of Alberta will also participate in best practices, case studies,
alpha and beta test programs, modeling and benchmarking efforts, and will serve
as a reference site for other educational institutions. To date, the University
of Alberta has placed 40 courses online using WebCT Vista and plans to have
several hundred courses migrated over to the AES system by September 2003. Future
plans include full deployment of WebCT Vista for more than 150,000 student seats.
"eLearning is truly a mission-critical service for the University of Alberta,
and the next generation of WebCT will assist us with achieving several of our
core institutional objectives: recruiting and satisfying new students and faculty;
providing the best possible learning experience for our students' lives and
careers; and creating an improved learning environment inside and outside the
classroom," explains Dr. Doug Owram, Provost and Vice President (Academic).
Province-Wide Use
In addition to building online learning within the institution, the University
of Alberta serves as a resource to colleges and universities regionally and
worldwide. As a WebCT Institute, the university shares its observations, best
practices, and expertise in eLearning with members of the Institute Network,
and with the WebCT community as a whole.
As the first-ever Sun Microsystems Center of Excellence for E-Learning, the
school serves as a reference site for eLearning infrastructure, providing advice
and assistance on server selection and management issues to educational institutions
worldwide.
The Province of Alberta also has a province-wide WebCT license, allowing all
educational institutions in the region to develop and launch distributed learning
programs using WebCT. Many are already doing so, with programs that include
multimedia resources, such as video and audio files and animation.
To learn more about the University of Alberta's eLearning program, visit
www.ualberta.ca/ webct, or contact Susan Stein, Distributed Learning Project
Lead and WebCT Administrator, at [email protected].
